Regular trash costs extra money after a couple bags, here, so we're encouraged to put anything in recycling that can go there. Our city has us put recycling out at the curb, unbagged and uncovered, in plastic bins.
Meanwhile, wind exists.
It's more of a littering program than a recycling program, really.
Oh it's much worse. It's all mixed up together, no sorting. I doubt any of it actual gets recycled, except maybe the metal. It's such an obviously terrible program that surely it only exists to funnel money to someone's cousin, or something. Ineffective, and directly causes several trash-devils swirling down the street every year. Been that way for at least a decade, and there's little or no agitation to eliminate or fix the program.
[EDIT] that is, I meant the bins are all made of plastic, so light and prone to blowing around or tipping, not that it's a bin dedicated to plastic. We don't sort, here, all the metal, cardboard, and plastic goes in the same open-topped plastic containers. No glass collection is done whatsoever, as it's not permitted in regular trash or recycling, so you have to sort that out on your own.
> It's such an obviously terrible program that surely it only exists to funnel money to someone's cousin, or something.
Primarily, it makes people feel good about their excessive consumption and it helps people win elections by letting them claim they did something.
But really, the only solution to prevent or reverse environmental damage is drastically reducing consumption. Reusing isn’t going to work, recycling definitely doesn’t work, but no one will win political points for that viewpoint and who really wants to reduce their consumption.
But if people around the world became united against this issue, the solution would be dead simple. Hit fossil fuels with a huge tax. A tax big enough to make prices for everything rise and we will immediately see a reduction in consumption.
Seattle even introduced a punitive fine for NOT contaminating the recycling stream!