> When people don’t sort their trash properly, batches of recyclables can become contaminated and compost can be improperly discarded into landfills. I've read

> When people don’t sort their trash properly, batches of recyclables can become contaminated and compost can be improperly discarded into landfills. I've read this many times over the years, but my intuition tells me that if this was true, no single batch of trash would ever be usable. All the data we have is that people are terrible at following instructions, much less when there's no way to be caught doing the wrong thing, yet I'm supposed to believe that all the 100 neighbours that share trash with me are all doing the right thing and not compromising trash loads? This sounds to me like not using phones in airplanes, if it were actually a problem they'd take them away from you.