This is the opposite of my experience. When I was a kid (80s and 90s) every place I lived made you separate your recyclables. It's only been relatively recently (maybe 10ish years or so?) that I've seen single-stream recycling become the norm. I'd also point out that a ton of plastics recycling and e-waste was never really recycled - we just shipped it to China to sort-of-recycle it, but they stopped being the world's dumping ground a few years ago.