I've worked at many tech companies (arguably dealing with the smarter side of humanity), and have had to re-educate many people including software engineers on what's garbage, recycling or trash. The problem isn't that people are too dumb to recycle, it's that they don't care.

So someone still has to sort it. Raise taxes. Hire sorters. Save time and money by having software engineers spend more time learning software engineering, not whether a corn-based plastic spoon should go in compost or recycling.

This is a problem with capitalism. A sense of social responsibility is traded for personal satisfaction what I am assuming is some form of subtle aggression to those in non-western cultures knowing that their garbage will be sent to poorer and brown communities to live with.