The author did say: "UX is turning those four bins into two (or one!) and signing up with a single stream recycling vendor."
If it is easier for the data scientist to sift through and correct bad data than it is for a UX professional, it absolutely makes sense to have the data scientist do the work. But the UX doesn't get to take credit for that decision.
His follow through after the initial bad analogy is then frustratingly vague; he just hand waves at Apple and gives no concrete examples of solving UX problems.
The point is software. There I should not spend a fraction of a second thinking, because that does not happen twice a day. It happens every 15 minutes if we are talking about me looking at my phone. UX thinking there makes a real, tangible difference.
Without the background, it just sort of sounds like "consult your UX people for the answer, always...we're never wrong".
In the US the problem however is that recycling collection is not standardized. Each city does it differently, which gets in the way of the standardization you propose. We would need a Federal standard (or at least an agreement by the relevant industry association) to help there.
It takes a bit of culture remapping, but certainly doable.
Want good examples? Spend some time in Germany or Sweden.
Here in New York, I recently lived in a building where people would, on a weekly basis, discard pizzas, soiled napkins and rotisserie chicken carcasses in the recycling bin. This was a modern building with just two different recycling bins (one for plastic/metal, the other for paper/cardboard). It's amazing how little people care.
In my current NYC neighbourhood, there are no recycling bins at all, and people have to sort and bag their recycling and put it on the street one night of the week. Not surprisingly, almost nobody bothers. Other than myself, I've only observed bags from my neighbour next door. The US can be pretty infuriating/depressing sometimes.
The person then simply matches number on article to the number on bin and throws, dead simple.
See my comment above for detailed description of this.
The problem is when items have multiple labels, because they're not made of one thing. The simplest example is Saran wrap, where the box is "paper", and the part to cut plastic is either "aluminium" or "plastic" (there are brands that make it in paper so that it's easier, though). And both parts go in different bins. Bottles can have 3 parts: plastic cap, PET bottle, paper label. All in different bins.
Then you add rules where things need to be clean, which mean in theory, your toothpaste tube needs to be cut open, and cleaned, before putting it in the bin.
And different cities have different rules.
It needs to be dead simple: number of labels = number of bins available. Maybe number of labels can be more than number of bins by 1 or 2 at most.
Secondly, use numbering instead of icons. Numbering is dead simple to match, icons require effort to match on the box against the picture on bin.
In the case of saran wrap: the box should clearly say #2 for box and #3 for contents (saran wrap). That would resolve the case you mentioned.
As for the salan wrap, the point is that it's not a box vs contents problem. The box itself needs to be broken up (removing the cutter part) before being thrown away.