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You're not going to solve the problem and your municipality isn't helping unless it burning the garbage, because that's what contaminated loads are. There's absolutely no reason to have multi stream plastics recycling at the consumer end, save for plastic bags because at scale they can be recycled. Only a very small amount of plastics are monetarily valuable. I would not feel guilty at all about throwing out plastics unless they are clean and food free. It's pointlessly wasteful as most processing plants in the US cannot handle soiled recyclables efficiently if at all. I say this as a long time, Earth hugging, reusable bag toting, fuel efficient vehicle recycler. The US is not a major contributor to plastics pollution. There should be no moral dilemma here. Just by trying to do the right thing in this case you're doing. If you want to do more have a cheese pizza night once a week instead of one with meat toppings and you'll significantly reduce your carbon footprint with minimal change to your lifestyle. If doing the by the planet is your thing having one vegetarian meal that you enjoy a week is going to be significantly more impactful at keeping the planet cleaner and using less resources (the reduce part of the 3rs) than most of the plastics recycling you do. Contaminated glass, plastics, and paper can ruin an entire comingled load which generally happens anyways.

Some specifics on ocean plastics that covers a bit of general plastics.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4671

That’s a good point: if municipalities want you to recycle, they need to provide the necessary infrastructure, and that means at least three source separated bins (ideally 5-7), and a clean container collection system. Otherwise it just turns people off the whole system. A financial incentive to save money when you don’t throw away as much into the landfill bin helps too.

Any chance you could compost the kitchen scraps in your garden?

With respect to composting- we're also issued a yard waste bin that's for a composting program (a good idea), so some kitchen scraps can go in there (I'm renting and good compost takes longer than I plan on staying here), but food waste/kitchen scraps aren't a large part of what we fill up our landfill bin with. It's mostly food packaging that's definitely too leaky/gross for the recycling bin and general household waste from stuff like emptying the vacuum cleaner or soiled paper towels.

Necessary infrastructure extends beyond just providing for recycling- households are going to produce waste that doesn't make economic or environmental sense to recycle, and all the encouragement and financial incentives in the world aren't going to stop that. Encouraging people to be less wasteful is important, but we need to stop demonizing landfills and use of the landfill bins because that sentiment has perverted the whole household recycling process.

It's gotten so bad here that a few months ago, they had city representatives on the radio threatening fines for people that put non-recyclable waste in their bins, as if that's the solution to mixed-recycling being uneconomical. They went as far as to say that it was malicious- that people were putting non-recyclable stuff, like used pizza boxes (their example), in the recycling bins to purposefully sabotage the whole system. The disconnect is huge and at some point the holier-than-thou attitude and the short-sighted laws passed with it are going to blow up in our collective faces.

Ideally you would incentivize people to create less trash by charging them by weight or volume for collection, but there are two possibilities for households wanting lower bills: reducing waste or littering. And it only takes a few people choosing littering to make a huge mess.

I'd try to collect payment for disposal earlier. If you pay for disposal when you buy the product, it makes doing the right thing easy. It also makes products with wasteful packaging more expensive right there in the store, encouraging people to buy less wasteful alternatives.

This also why I like the idea of bottle deposits and would hope they continue into many other containers. The customer pays them up front and gets paid back when it properly enters the waste stream.

You think consumers are going to have 3-7 bins in their homes?

As a family of three we have a 140 litre (~37 US Gallons) bin for non-recyclables that's collected every two weeks and it's normally only half full

Same here. We only got 60 liters for 3 guys and it's fine.

I don’t think it would be political suicide to reform recycling laws. It would help move the conversation forward.

> There's two people in my household and we both are very conscience of being wasteful

> if we produce more than 2.5 garbage bags of waste in a 2-week period, we have to hold on to it for another garbage pickup

It's pretty easy to have much less than 2.5 garbage bags of waste every 2-week. You should read just a tiny bit of zero waste please, it may help you immensely.

You may believe that recycling isn't working, that's fine, but there's plenty of simple easy ways to reduce waste and have less than 2.5 garbage bags of waste every 2 weeks.

The 4 R rules is simple: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

You still got 3 R to works on.