Penn and Teller are full of it as usual. Glass/metals recycling is perfectly beneficial. Paper recycling is generally beneficial if you can get people to recycle the correct paper. But in situations where paper waste is relatively uniform (such as printer paper in offices, schools, etc.) paper recycling can be very efficient and profitable.
It turns out that plastics recycling (at least at the consumer level) is not that beneficial and probably just an elaborate marketing campaign. If Penn and Teller dug in and did their research and outed plastics recycling as a marketing campaign I would say they are great public intellectuals and forward thinking visionaries. Instead they just recycled (get it?) some long refuted right wing lies about all recycling and thus ensured nobody would take them seriously. And if part of their argument was correct that was completely coincidental.
Did you actually watch it? They point out that at the very least aluminum recycling make sense. At the time glass and paper recycling seemed to have some questions around profitability. They mostly spent the episode dedicated to plastics.
They also admitted that despite their findings they found it very difficult to personally give up on recycling. That's what makes the lie so effective. We want to believe we are helping, that we are doing something effective that makes up for our wastefulness and excess consumption. We aren't.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0771119/