I think that we should have started with municipal composting, paper recycle and plastic Reduce programs. Most of the contamination is from food waste and it m

I think that we should have started with municipal composting, paper recycle and plastic Reduce programs. Most of the contamination is from food waste and it makes up most of the weight of trash (obviously because of water content) and I imagine is the major source of methane in our landfills. Somehow we started with recycling plastics programs (perhaps industry manipulation) which is a complicated mess. Where I live, they still can't recycle black plastics so they end up in the landfill anyway. The these latest developments, I am sure if we actually looked, we would find out that there are provinces in China making a fortune importing recyclables that actually just went straight to a landfill. Of course, now they have decades of trash to contend with. Meanwhile we can all sit pretty thinking about how wonderful we were for separating our recyclables.