They didn't throw up their hands, they recognized a very important fact: Trying to teach every trash bin user how to sort is very difficult. It might be much e

They didn't throw up their hands, they recognized a very important fact: Trying to teach every trash bin user how to sort is very difficult. It might be much easier to instead teach a few specialized people how to sort (the single stream recyclable service). This is easier for the trash users, and probably a lot more efficient as the number of sorting errors might be greatly reduced. The food vs other items problem is probably why they explicitly said it would likely be two bins, and one only if it could be made to work. This is the point of the article: UX is not UI. The solution encompasses changes to the entire system, not just the UI.