Color me cynical.
I live out in the boonies and haul my own trash. (And all my relations - if I didn't, they'd just dump theirs in a gulley.) I waste a lot of time curating the trash partly out of false idealism, partly practical. Don't want the trash to smell, as it only gets hauled three or four times a year. Food waste or anything "wet" goes in the compost or macerator. There's a long row of blue bins - glass, metal, plastic, paper. And metal cans for "hazardous" stuff (batteries, light bulbs, oil). Everything else gets compacted. At the transfer station, I see it all get dumped together on a big concrete pad and scooped into the same trucks headed for the landfill. They do sometimes keep the glass and paper separate. The only real advantage is it's free to dump stuff in the blue bins. Some of the former "universal" hazardous waste (e.g. fluorescent bulbs) they won't accept at all any more - just means it all goes in the regular trash.
I also run a lot of tests on products intended for "green marketing." "Whaddaya mean it didn't pass? We already printed up the labels and bought the ads! Isn't there some other test that it will pass for a bit more money?" Yeah, if they keep calling around, someone will do it for them.
