On a trip through Italy a few years back I was amazed this small tourist spot had a dozen recycling cans taking up the sidewalks. I watched as tourists dutifully sorted their plastics, papers, food, etc in to the appropriate bin like well trained little monkeys. When the trash truck came they tossed all the bins in to the general trash and drove it to the landfill. I was just laughing and when I asked the restaurant server why they bother with all the cans. He said the tourists revolt and leave their “recycleables” laying around all over the place because they are so offended by putting something “recycleable” in the regular trash can to be disposed of. So, they keep the recycle bins out and just dump it all in the same trash truck for the well trained tourists.
Great story.
In my workplace before I retired we had a variation on that theme.
We had recycle bins everywhere in the fifteen story high rise where I worked.
One of my coworkers had to stay really late and decided to follow the janitorial contractors around to see exactly what they did with the recycle containers.
It turned out that when they got to the bottom floor and the main dumpster they just dumped all the to be recycled stuff into the main regular trash dumpster.
This may be going on almost everywhere at this point.
The ragpicker bourgeoisie.