An implementation that I have experienced first hand in rural Maine where we did have to sort our recyclables. This admittedly doesn't work everywhere, but hope

An implementation that I have experienced first hand in rural Maine where we did have to sort our recyclables. This admittedly doesn't work everywhere, but hopefully it provides insight. There was no trash/recycling pick-up. Most people made a trip to "The Dump" once a week with their trash + recyclables. For recyclables, There was a large building a few hundred feet wide with various windows in its face. One window was for black/white paper, one was for colored paper, one was for #1 plastics, another for #2, etc, glass, cans, etc... All containers had to be rinsed out and have their labels removed. It's preferable to sort these at home, but some people would just have a big bag of mixed recyclables and move between windows, tossing things in. A couple of employees inside would watch the windows and yell at anyone mixing recyclables. It's vary laborious and you might wonder why people wouldn't just throw recyclables away instead? We had to pay $2 per trash bag, which we bought at the Town Hall. This incentivized people not to throw away recyclables. The $2 bags were large enough to hold 3 or 4 13-gallon kitch-trash-bags of trash. With trash, you would stand on a platform and throw these $2 bags of trash into the top of an open shipping container which would be trucked away to a regional landfill. This solution was a HUGE improvement over the previous solution, which was a dirt road that led to a big hill that you would throw anything and everything off of (spoiler, we ended up with contaminated ground water in certain areas).