> Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial.
Collecting 10 cans is not really trivial. And even with 10 different cans, the result still needs to be further sorted (there are 20 or 30 types of recyclable plastic alone). Glass needs to be sorted into 4-5 different colors. Paper needs to be sorted into 4-5 different qualities.
Industrial waste sorting certainly is expensive -- due to capital expenditure, not ongoing costs -- but it's needed in every recycling solution. The problem with expecting the public to sort, is that humans are less good at sorting than (well-designed) machines and relying on humans sorting reducing the percentage of recyclable material that is actually recycled.
There are serious arguments that all general waste should be machine sorted since it's the only way to maintain maximum levels of recycling.
"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.
It's actually much more efficient. Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial.
I would love to have 10 cans and help the environment. Something like this:
Glass, plastic, paper, metal, bio/food, electronics, rubber, textiles, everything else.
Right now most of that stuff gets mixed and gets piled up polluting ground water.