Not even just the time, there is a clear energy cost that every household has been paying electricity and gas costs for heating of water. Extra cleaning materials in brushes and washing up liquid and additional dishwasher tablets etc etc. I doubt most households have good enough accounting to attribute the cost of recycling directly other than perhaps the cost of recycling bags (ours requires all recycling in clear bags) but it goes well beyond just time, we have literally burnt CO2 to recycle something that actually can't be recycled.

What I don't understand is why governments and councils continued to go along with this, to collect it all separately and then just send most of it to be burnt or landfill, the cost surely wasn't worth it. My Freedom of information act request to my council about plastic recycling was eye opening, just 3.2% of the plastic put into recycling correctly was actually recycled. They know full well this is pointless and yet it continues.