I agree. In the States, we largely adopted "blue bin" recycling that encourages people to dump everything they think might be recyclable into the same blue bin.

I agree. In the States, we largely adopted "blue bin" recycling that encourages people to dump everything they think might be recyclable into the same blue bin. The idea was that this would encourage high recycling rates, and eventually technology would catch up and figure out how to efficiently sort everything. So far, that hasn't happened, so we just got high recycle rates but terrible streams of material that are not economic to recycle. I agree that the Japanese approach would be a better one, even though it would take large social change, and would result in lower recycle rates for quite a while.