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Staples, office max/dept etc and most donation/resale locations use a recycling program that was originally created and partly funded by Dell. Who actually controls it now, I’ve lost track of.

There are many different methods of pre sorting plastics. The most common in use today is micro-shredding and then optical sorting.

They start by removing any definite contamination by hand on high speed belts.
Optical scanners then sort by colour. Batched colours are shredded to what is basically plastic confetti strips. Similar in size to a cross cut strip shredder for paper on average, though with more variation.
Automated scanners then further sort the clean plastic shreds by type using a combination of light and laser scanners.

What’s left, today, normally heads to one of two destinations.
Compressed block mixed with wood and paper castoffs, which are burned as fuel blocks.
Or
Steel manufacturing, as a very low cost carbon supply.
Landfilling of plastics from the recycling stream is rather rare today. It happens but most states have laws restricting it if it out right banning the practice.

Some of the best centres, such as Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago, have a near total recover of 5 of the 7 classed types.
If you live in a large city, outside of Texas, there’s a fairly good chance your curbside is being recycled properly.

Beyond that, check out how2recycle for drop off locations for other materials.
We are far behind countries like Japan and Singapore, but we are far ahead of most “green” countries in Europe and South America.
The EU tends to have better recover rates for what it DOES declare acceptable. But, in the US with some personal work, we can recycle almost anything we want to as consumers. From basic plastic and paper to complex electronics to bio organics such as poo and sea shells.
We recycle more dry cell batteries than any other country. We have the largest wood waste redirection in world. We’re in the top 10 nations for post-consumer compost.
And rates of 82-86 percent of all plastics the enter the recycling stream end up new plastic. That’s beyond even Japan’s average annual estimate of 78%.

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