When they were little, my kids always used to love watching a show called “How It’s Made.” Unlike a lot of what they wanted to watch, I liked the show, too. If you’re a parent, you know how rare that is!

If you’ve never seen it, “How It’s Made” is an almost hypnotically no-frills show about, well, how things are made. Each episode goes through the industrial processes involved in crafting everything from corrugated plastic drain pipes to breath mints. The camera slowly pans across the factory, while a deadpan narrator explains what’s happening over Muzak-style background music. It’s both fascinating — bet you’ve never thought about how machines count out the right number of mints for each package before — and somehow soothing.

I was thinking about “How It’s Made” the other day when I went to drop off some of my plastic waste at a local center for hard-to-recycle items. The center takes a lot of the things that our curbside recycling won’t — electronics, berry clamshells, denim, and styrofoam — and makes sure that they actually get recycled. The place was a hive of activity as recyclers and volunteers sorted and, in some cases, deconstructed items to make sure they’d get recycled.

So people were holding their plastic packages up to the light, one by one, to find out whether they were #1s or #6s. They were snipping the metal parts of clothes hangars from the plastic parts. They were sorting packing peanuts (did you know there are different types of packing peanuts, only some of which can be recycled?). They were separating different types of plastic film.

It was, in many ways, an episode of “How It’s Unmade.” And unmaking every one of these items required a great deal of human labor.

When I got home, I went online to see how the strawberry clamshells that I was recycling were made. I watched a few videos — they weren’t as good as “How It’s Made,” but they did the job. Most of them looked something like this:

and this:

In the videos, rolls of flexible PET plastic are heated, stamped, shaped, and stacked into piles of packages to keep your strawberries fresh and unblemished. And there isn’t a human being in sight — the whole process is automated, except for the person who picks up the clamshells at the end and shows them to the camera.

The life cycles of strawberry containers are just one example of a serious issue: We’ve made it very easy to do environmental damage, but undoing that damage often takes a lot more effort, time, and money.

Making things (and doing the environmental damage associated with making them) is easy; unmaking them (and undoing that damage) is much harder.

It’s widely known at this point that the vast majority of the plastic that we produce doesn’t get recycled. At best, our unrecycled plastic ends up in landfills, where it will take centuries to decompose. At worst, it clogs up creeks, swirls in ocean gyres, or breaks down into microplastics that we and other animals ingest.

Why don’t we recycle our plastic? Mostly because it’s hard and expensive to do so. To effectively recycle items, facilities have to sort them (there are lots of types of plastics, and they generally can’t be mixed in recycling) and make sure they’re clean and pure (some plastics have additives in them that make them hard to process). Moreover, many plastics must be “downcycled” — meaning that they can only be reborn as lower-quality material. This means that plastic bags and bottles become park benches rather than new bags and bottles.

Recycling many types of plastic is simply not that profitable. Since we live in a world driven by profit, this means that it just doesn’t get done.

Meanwhile, creating “virgin” plastic items — new bottles, tubs, and wrappers — is often much cheaper than creating them using recycled materials. And companies are churning out virgin plastic at a ridiculous rate.

Coca-Cola produces 200,000 new bottles every minute! They do so through highly automated processes, as illustrated in the video below:

Again, it’s all automated and efficient. So efficient, in fact, that the bottle costs the manufacturer only a couple of cents to make. Not all that expensive for something that will survive for hundreds of years.

But let’s assume that you polish off your bottle of Coke and intend to recycle it. In order for that bottle to really get recycled, you’ll have to make sure you rinse it and deposit it in the proper recycling container. Then the recycling company will have to separate it from all of the other recyclable (and non-recyclable) materials that make their way into the recycling bins. The process looks something like this:

And here’s how those bottles become polyester:

Though there’s a lot of automation in both processes, recycling seems to be an inherently messier, more labor-intensive process than just making new plastic and dumping it in the landfill.

Plastic is one of the most important environmental scourges facing us, but it’s not the only one. It strikes me that most environmental problems have similar dimensions — they’re cheaper and easier to create than they are to remediate.

It’s been pretty easy and afordable to deplete the soil and pollute it with herbicides and pesticides, but it’s going to take time and effort to undo that damage. It’s cheap and convenient to buy crappy fast-fashion clothing, but making use of it after we’re finished wearing it won’t be easy. It makes a lot of economic sense to rapidly clear-cut forests to turn them into timber or farmland, but restoring that land to biodiversity will take decades of effort. And it’s been pretty easy to pump billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, but it will take a great deal of work to undo that.

It’s worth thinking about this next time you contemplate buying some plastic junk (or doing something else that may be environmentally harmful): Yes, this is cheap and easy, but how much effort will be required to undo the damage?