At the start of this year my municipality recognized that collecting plastics separately was simply a net loss environmentally and economically and removed all plastic waste containers (except for PET). Instead they will now simply try to recover some of the useful plastics for recycling from the mixed trash and burn the rest with the trash.
When the plastic recycling stream contains 70% trash that you can't use, then recovering the 30% from the plastic recycling stream is barely more economical than recovering that from the mixed trash stream.
Properly sorting stuff is hard. You can't just look at whether something is vaguely plastic-ish or paper-ish, you actually have to inspect every single item for the recycling label. There are dozens of tiny gotchas to stumble over.
Luckily we don't actually need to do all that. There are automated plants which can take in a mixed domestic waste stream, and separate out things like metal and the various forms of plastic. This means you no longer have to worry about people sorting it incorrectly, and you no longer have to worry about people who can't be bothered to sort at all. It's a win-win, really.
If something seems recyclable, I'll throw it in on the chance that the sorters will accept it, rather than guaranteeing it goes to the landfill by putting it in the trash bin.
Unfortunately, the city gets very upset about the recyclable materials being in plastic bags (something about it messing up their machines). I like it better this way because I don't have an indoor bin full of loose, used plastics and paper which feels unorganized and dirty.
I feel like these small, yet annoying, inconveniences hurt participation (in addition to the countless stories of plastics and garbage just being thrown into the same hole in the ground, or into an ocean patch off the coast of some other country).
Why would the garbage man do my dishes?
Look, I throw away my trash because it's super convenient and the city provides a wonderfully helpful service of hauling my garbage off for me. But if the city comes to me and says "Hey, we want you to come out here and help us dig the landfill, because it's actually easier if you do it" -- then I'd probably just light my garbage on fire or toss it in a river.
You could actually make the world a better place by throwing your bagged recyclables in the trash because then you aren't actively harming the recycling process.