No recycling process is perfect, so recycling only postpones the reckoning for mass consumption, and small backyard operations can leave terrible pollution and health damage. The real fix is to consume less overall and favour things that can be repaired, upgraded or refurbished.
Material gets recycled when someone can make money wringing value out of it, not because it is virtuous. That profit motive is often the most sustainable outcome available, even when the methods that follow are ugly.
Containers that bring manufactured goods from Asia to rich countries would otherwise sail home nearly empty, so shipping scrap back is cheap. Shipping costs therefore decide that much of a rich country's recycling ends up in Asia, near the factories that need raw material.
Places that are still building up can afford hand labour to pull every usable scrap from waste, so they find value where wealthy countries see only garbage. Their scrap trade can be less wasteful than rich-country recycling, and their buyers gradually take over a market once run by Western sellers.
Every ton of metal recovered from scrap is a ton that does not have to be dug out of the ground. A rich country's discards can feed a developing economy's growth while easing destructive, wasteful mining.