I want to help out, really I do, but I have more important things to worry about than which type of plastic goes in which bin. Hell, I'm happy to put the right kind of thing in the right bin if they made it clear which is which and why. But they don't do a very good job of communicating to me why this is important. They just say "recycle properly" then try to make you feel irresponsible and like a bad citizen for not knowing the proper way to do it based on some opaque and arcane process.
If you want people to help out, make it easy for them to feel like they're a part of it. The rules around recycling do the opposite - make you feel like you're harming things if you don't do things exactly right. Not a very empowering feeling at all.
For example, self-service checkouts in supermarkets, fast food, building a holiday package, etc.
Recycling is the same. They have 'outsourced' much of the job to local government and consumers.
It's a typical externalities problem - the full cost of using some types of packaging is not paid by the one doing the packaging.
What if we couldn't export our waste for someone else to deal with? Maybe then the feeling of personal responsibility would come rushing back.
Do everything to make it easy at both ends.
You're just playing NIMBY by passing the responsibility on.
Here are the rules for recycling where I lived: plastic to be cleaned before recycling (a minimal trace of food, allegedly, would require the whole batch of plastic to be thrown away). You are also supposed to separate the plastic part from the cardboard part on the packaging. You are also supposed to check if there is a specific type of coating on the inside of a cardboard box like foil for milk or wax for cups. Metal, Glass need to be cleaned too, although without threat of discarding a ton of waste. Paper is recycled separately from cardboard, however I believe that was for operational rather than technical reasons. Recycled paper could not be recycled again and glassy paper (magazine covers) needed removal.
When you get to that stage you realise that the average product in the supermarket would require quite a lot of processing. That's not realistic to expect people to follow all those rules and if you rely on thousands or ten of thousands of people to comply with them in order for your recycling to work, you are deep in the designed to fail territory.
You know, it's interesting that you say that we can't expect people to follow all those rules, but I just got back from Japan and WOW. That country has basically gotten everyone on board with following every rule. There are like four different receptacles for trash and you have to walk all your own trash out to the proper drop point. It seems like a crazy complex system, but the people understand why it has to be that way (no landfill space) and why their civic duty matters.
You say that, yet people are evidently kept awake at night by the thought of little plastic cushions.
In the case of my story, it appears to be working well too. People have 3 bins, different collection days and quota (and tax). On the surface there is no real way for the system not to work, unless you consider the increase in fly-tipping. (allegedly)
I'm not quite sure it is working as advertised though. I can't believe that the people can determine the coating type that was used on whatever cardboard piece they see and get it wrong in small enough percentages that the process depending on it is still efficient. And it is a compounded effect, the more rules, the more edge cases. I haven't seen any change in the packaging of product, if anything it has gotten even more difficult to process than before. If people were choosing brand with easier packaging, all the brands would have followed by now ( those rules have been in place for over 15 years now ), I just can't believe that people moaning when a TV channel number change would just happily start washing their ready meal plastic boxes.
Another example that makes me doubtful. There are recycling centers for chemical, electronic stuff, gardening waste, ... The rules are quite simpler (eg: cooking oil vs car oil), yet people get it wrong all the time and the people managing the center are busy directing and correcting people all the time. That's at the recycling center, a place where people have already committed time to specifically go recycling their stuff.
Don't recyclers have to sort submissions anyway? It's expected that citizens will "completely fail" to adhere to recycling instructions and submissions must be sorted anyway.
Is it a net profitable endeavor (energy in vs out)?
What are the recycled materials being used for, and what are the costs to get the material into that state?
And you know this how?