To dump or not to dump. That is the question.

Our community has curbside recycling. Once a week, the truck comes by our home and our blue plastic bins are emptied into the collection truck. Used papers, boxes, cans and plastics are driven away to the big recycling center, somewhere. The empty plastic bins are set down for us to return them to our homes and fill them up again.
Recycling has become a ritual, in our city, and judging from the number of bins placed at the curbs, most folks in town are participating.
However, I have noticed that all of those plastic bins are appearing a little worse for the wear. Every one that I have seen is being held together by duct tape. One of these days, all of those plastic bins are going to fall apart. They will all become unusable. We will be forced to throw away all of our blue plastic boxes. Each household has one or two plastic bins and think about that being multiplied by over 50,000 homes. Egad! That is a lot of used plastic.
My question is.......Will the amount of waste, created by those broken bins, outweigh all of the recycled material we have put in them, over the past 8-10 years? Maybe and maybe not?
Would we have been better off throwing the recyclables into the trash and not having all of those bins created and sold.....and soon filling the land fill?
I don't know, but I am thinking about the issue. The answer will probably never be made known.  Powers at City Hall would not eagerly tell a whole city that, due to recycling, we environmentalists  might have made the trash problem even worse.

Dear Lord. We are questioners by design. We are "doubting Thomasinas". Show me how to work on my Faith, in all aspects of my life. I want to "walk by Faith."