A plastic bottle is easy enough to process, but you can only do that a few times before the material degrades too much to be recycled again. And as plastic products have gotten more complex—multilayered pouches for baby food, for instance—they’ve gotten harder to recycle. The industry’s literal dirty secret is that mountains of plastic waste are being shipped to economically developing countries, where the stuff is often burned in open pits, poisoning surrounding communities and sending still more microplastics and chemicals into the atmosphere.
https://www.wired.com/story/yet-another-problem-with-recycling-it-spews-microplastics/
Global plastic waste exports amounted to 4.21 million metric tons in 2022, a year-over-year decline of roughly 16 percent. In comparison to 2010, when global exports surpassed 15 million metric tons, shipments decreased by more than 70 percent. Plastic waste trade has dropped considerably since 2018, when China – then the world's largest plastic waste importer – declared a ban on imports of this material. In 2022, Germany was the leading exporter of plastic waste worldwide.
https://www.statista.com/topics/7943/global-waste-trade/#topicOverview