Single stream recycling is the majority style of municipal recycling here in the United States. It's popularity was along the lines of why we got Chip & Sign a

Single stream recycling is the majority style of municipal recycling here in the United States. It's popularity was along the lines of why we got Chip & Sign and not Chip & PIN EMV: Governments consider their citizens too uninformed and friction averse to sort their own recycling. They felt the consequence of that would be that the municipal recycling would become an underutilized money pit. Unfortunately, those governments got the predictions right, but got the consequences wrong. The cost of uninformed citizens putting plastic grocery bags, gardening hoses, and all sorts of non-recyclable trash into the single stream is extremely costly. Single stream plants shut down several times a day to remove plastic film bags from their machinery, untangle hoses, and remove literal tons of tainted recyclable material because someone threw a full paint can in their recycling bin. This is further exacerbated by many municipalities providing a recycling bin that is larger than your yard waste and trash bin. A city I lived in previously did this and many of my neighbors would just put their trash bags into the recycling bin because their trash bin was full. As such, single stream recycling has been on the ropes since before China raised it's standards. Now it's in full on panic mode. That said, I don't want to put up with a Japanese style rotation of trash days, special trash bags, and 50 page manuals on how to sort your trash and when to put it out either. Unfortunately, we're going to have to move away from single stream if we want to increase recycling efficiency, it seems.