The biggest problem I see and have learnt from people living in apartments is that they don't have enough space to place their garbage. Most importantly, they get less bins per person which means they end up forcibly contaminating the bins otherwise they won't be able to get rid of their waste for the week. I learned this a long time ago at my rental property (house next to apartments) which I manage, so on the day before bin day I am usually there and the management for the other building usually comes across and brings over plastic which he has sorted out because their bin is full and the yellow bin for our single tenant is basically empty.
It is usually cheaper for management to do nothing, if one even exists for most of the cheaper apartments, as extra bins means extra taxes which ultimately get passed on as strata fees. Some heroes will go find other bins and sort the rubbish properly because the bins are full and more rubbish will be thrown out at night. I know most apartments are managed poorly and only have a sinking fund which is mostly used for quarterly gardening and that's it; no actual person managing the garbage side.
Returning to what waste gets brought over from the apartments; it can include things like multiple bags of large sunrice jasmine rice PP 5 protective material. I mean, damn, if the sorting machines can't sort this bigger bag, then there must be something wrong right? According to the media article these are the types of bags that are getting caught in the machines; the bags are massive though. The others we get are the larger toilet paper plastic bags which again should be fine through the normal waste system but the machines are probably too primitive. Subsidise and fix the recycling system which gives long term benefits rather than have the current situation. That seems like a no brainer thing. The equipment in countries like Brazil allow for this all to happen automatically. It's not like it doesn't exist. In fact I recall they can recycle the mythical tetrapak and paper soft drink style cups which are banned in the yellow bin.
I've also seen people smashing printers due to a lack of space in their red rubbish bin and taking the HDPE parts and placing them into the recycling bin (guy across the street, lol.). This should also be fine except we have a very primitive recycling system in Australia. Literally, almost all of the printer can be recycled here in Australia; the smaller parts can even be sold to those fanboys that like to dissolve this stuff and take out the metal content. Little reason why it can't be done here. To be honest, I think it was probably fine because it won't get stuck in the sorting machine, but who knows whether this is actually allowed or not. (Do you know what the answer is? Strictly some councils will state bottles and containers only, no random crap, but others will take it; even bigger rolls of PP that are unused. My guess is some recyclers in certain states have more advanced equipment that allows for this to be done)
Some geniuses will also decide to put clothes in recycling bin because they are made out of polyester; and apparently this can actually be recycled. Some of those high vis shirts are recyclable too which I learned after finding some mysteriously thrown into my yellow bin. Sadly, our infrastructure likes to put this in the too hard basket or makes it just annoying enough that most people won't go to the supermarket and redcycle this or take it to a charity. If I had these clothes, I would just throw these types of clothes into the red bin, but have definitely seen this randomly thrown into my recycling bin by someone else. ಠ_ಠ (repeated for emphasis)
Either upgrade the recycling system to be able to sort this material or let us have bigger rubbish bins so we people can actually sort their rubbish properly.
Council knows the issues, the recyclers know the issues. There is a fix, they just need to cut the crap when they run to the media with a sad fake news story. No one out there is innocently contaminating their bins; the education program out there and the material that is sent to households clearly states what can and cannot go into certain bins. Almost everyone know what is the right thing to do, but almost 100% of the time someone's hand is forced because of the bureaucratic bs which the biased media keeps siding with. I see it everywhere, we can do something about it by sharing our bins. Forcing council's hand to do the right thing and give apartments bigger bins, or if there is some bureaucratic council rates issue; give all of us bigger bins so we can share more of it.
Until then millions of Australians are probably deliberately contaminating their bins due to a lack of space. If you see this is a problem, be a bloody good neighbour and offer space in your red bin.
Sure there are some genius level out there that know the composition of certain plastics and will recycle it. That's fine, and we should allow them to do so. It's like shredded paper, put it inside an envelope and the thing won't get caught in the sorter. This is another controversial topic.
TL;DR?