By what mechanism do you expect recycling less to help society on the margin?
(Are you thinking of instances where in order to recycle more you would have to do things that harm the environment more than sending the stuff to landfill would have, or that cost more than recycling would have saved -- e.g., where you'd have to wash stuff thoroughly before recycling it? Or is this about message-sending, and if so how does the causal chain go?)
In this instance -- though of course I don't know where you live and in any case haven't investigated deeply -- it seems to me that the claims on both sides are rather dubious. On the one hand we have the excessively moralized Recycle All The Things drive; on the other we have, e.g., your statement that "[government interventions] break functioning markets" without, so far as I can see, any evidence that there was or would have been a well functioning market without the government intervention. It seems fairly clear to me that the optimal amount of recycling is greater than zero, and so far as I know it's generally only been in response to government intervention that that's happened. (Not necessarily coercive intervention; e.g., where I live, local government provides recycling services and makes them easy to use but doesn't punish you for not using them -- though if that means you send a lot more stuff to landfill then you might have to pay more for extra collection.)
(It also seems plausible to me -- but I have only weak, indirect evidence -- that there is a local optimum, better than where most of the US and UK currently sits, where more stuff gets recycled using facilities that cost money to set up but once in place make recycling more effective, and which isn't easily accessible to the free market untouched by government intervention because the benefits are spread out but some individual or corporation would need to make the facilities actually get built.)
How are you saving the world? Please, let us know!
Whether it is solving the problem of death or teaching rationality, one of the correlated phenomena of being less wrong is making things better. Given the value many of us place on altruism, this extends beyond just ourselves and into that question of, “How can I make The Rest better?” The rest of my community. The rest of my country. The rest of my species. The rest of my world. To word it in a less other-optimizing way: How can I save the world?
So, tell us how you are saving the world. Not how you want to save the world. Not how you plan to. How you are, actively, saving the world. It doesn’t have to be “I invented a friendly AI,” or “I reformed a nation’s gender politics” or “I perfected a cryonics reviving process.” It can be a simple goal (“I taught a child how to recognize when they use ad hominen” or "I stopped using as much water to shower") or a simple action as part of a larger plan (such as “I helped with a breakthrough on reducing gas emissions in cars by five percent”).
If we accept this challenge of saving the world, then let us be open and honest with our progress. Let us put our successes on display and our shortcomings as well, so that both can be recognized, recommended, and, if need be, repaired.
If you are not doing anything to save the world, even something as simple as “learning about global risks” or “encouraging others to research a topic before deciding on it”? Then find something. Find a goal and work for it. Find an act that needs doing and do it.
Then tell us about it.