> The increased cost aspect is interesting, and is something I've recently learned about. Fortunately our local goodwill is very active in pre-screening items when you drop off so I don't feel a huge need to get into the weeds with it.

So they're paying some dude to pre-screen instead of paying a larger trash bill. It's still a cost to them. If people were a little more conscientious, those costs could be eliminated.

> But then that makes recycling that much less impactful as well. I don't know what the right answer is here other than we need to improve the sorting/processing to avoid consumers needing to understand the intricacies.

Those intricacies are not hard to learn, and the improvements you seek are probably a lot harder than you or I realize.