Seems better to put that effort towards development of techniques to sort en-masse. Likely controversial, but I think there is also an argument for simply throwing hard-to-recycle items in a landfill. If consumption continues to increase, it will likely become economically viable to eventually mine those landfills for raw materials.
Improperly sorted plastics are burried in a landfill. They will not fill the ocean with plastic whether recycled or trashed. Global warming is mostly a matter of energy usage, so recycling only helps that when it's more energy-efficient than the alternative.
-Population crisis
-Peak oil & oil crisis
-Global cooling concern in the 1970s
-Ozone crisis
-Rainforest crisis
-Worldwide food shortage
How about the fact that we are going to be 10 billion by the end of the century?
And the only reason that we have managed to avoid a food shortage has been the increase in the use of fertilizers which in turn is depleting the soil at a faster rate than ever before turning arable land into dust bowls and rivers becoming so polluted by the chemicals that there are massive extinction events in the population of fish all around the world?
Same for the oil crisis, the shale oil has stopped the crisis in its tracks but only for a short amount of time as the demand keeps on rising and inevitably the price per liter/gallon is going to be back to what it was before the GFC. Also, fracking is polluting the soil more than ever before.
In short most of the crises that you mentioned have not been solved, but simply delayed.
Eventually, they will catch up with us and somebody is going to have to pay? But who? Most likely taxpayers as always.
What I find baffling is what are you going to say to your kids/ grand-kids when they ask you where the forests went? Why is the air so polluted? Why are the rivers so toxic and completely empty?
Should I go on?
People generally don't want to live in smog/pollution if they have a choice but will do whatever it takes to survive even if that means harming the environment.
For example, no amount of lecturing or rainforest protests are going to stop people that depend on slash & burn for survival. Best option is to open up trade, provide GMOs & fertilizer, and provide economic opportunity so they have options other than slash & burn.
You also see this with China, they've made huge progress environmentally, mostly because they can now afford to.
There is an entirely separate, less frequent service that collects organic waste, so there’s probably some overhead there.
The line you're drawing to define "labor done on behalf of a paid service provider" is laughably ridiculous. The service they provide is "picking up sorted bins of trash". You're not "doing their work for them" to meet the terms of the paid service agreement.
https://www.aoausa.com/magazine/?p=4982
I bet, each city, that enforces waste sorting, has a monopoly.
This is insanity on stilts.
I'm skeptical that it will ever be economical in a scalable way to mine landfills, but I don't know enough to dispute it.
Price mechanisms let you answer that question yourself. Say you have 5 bags' worth of rubbish of which 3 bags' worth is recyclable. You can either spend the time to sort the one from the other, or you can pay for 2 extra bags.
So yes it is good because it is the only solution we have on hand that is effective. Development of reclamation techniques should be done in parallel to landfill diversion.