> Years ago there was a "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" episode on recycling that did a decent job of looking into the psychology and economics of recycling. I watc

> Years ago there was a "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" episode on recycling that did a decent job of looking into the psychology and economics of recycling. I watched that episode and it was hardly a decent job. Penn is a staunch libertarian and that colors his presentation of the facts. Also, it is an entertainment show so they love to have something to yell "bullshit" at. There is no nuance. For sure, in the zeal to increase recycling percentage, it was a huge mistake for cities which used to collect sorted recyclables to have a "single stream" recycling flow to make it easier for people to "recycle". No argument there. Something that shouldn't be discounted is that it seems like a relatively simple problem to have NN image classifiers to sort the stream of waste. It doesn't need to be 99% accurate at all -- it is better that it can classify 90% of the items with near 100% accuracy and just throw away the 10% it isn't sure about, resulting in more pure recycling streams.