"It's actually much more efficient. Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial." Nope. 10 years ago it was like that, not any more. Sorting technology ha

"It's actually much more efficient. Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial." Nope. 10 years ago it was like that, not any more. Sorting technology has gotten much better. Here is the thing: you need to sort anyway, even if you collect waste separately, because you can't rely on everybody being 100% correct in putting stuff in the right container. So 2 decades ago when people started collecting separately, the sorting stations were partly automated and could only process relatively small amounts of 'pollution' (e.g. cans in heaps of paper), and the rest was done manually. Nowadays machines can handle much more capacity, and the overhead of collecting things separately has become higher than the costs of processing everything from a big heap of mixed materials.