Mildly Infuriating

I work for a plastic recycling plant manufacturer, specifically for the sorting, shredding, cleaning and drying steps of plastic recycling (after that you usually have melting and extrusion before ending up with small plastic pellets that can be used to make other stuff).

I can confirm you, we have "cycling filtered grey water" cleaning. You don't need to clean up your plastic containers, just empty them. Also various chemicals will be used in the process, when necessary.

We also make de-labelers to remove the labels from plastic bottles, although this kind of label in the picture is extremely hard to remove and, afaik, either requires human labor (aka poor countries with labor conditions you don't want to think about) or just becomes waste. So yeah, this is some of the worst shit.

At least in Germany that step is not necessary as far as I know.

I agree, but rinsing at home addresses multiple concerns.

I think the issue is that some people throw out containers with their lids on and completely covered in food matter.

a) it makes it difficult/impossible to actually recycle when it finally gets there. b) it attracts wildlife to your recycling bins.

It's just best practice, really.

I'd be 100% ok if all containers were mason jars. Most of the time, I can't even reuse glass jars because of their stupid, non-standard lids!

Cereal should just come in a biodegradable plastic, no box.

But standardize everything. Never mind hassling consumers not to use plastic bags when companies are putting layer upon layer of plastic on their products. If a manufacturer can't use a standardized package, they shouldn't be allowed to sell the product without a massive environmental tax added onto their product.

We need both. We need companies to do more to make things out of easier to recycle or compost materials, and we need consumers to do more to separate things to make them easier to recycle. It's far too late to push responsibilities around, we all need to be responsible.

I don't have different plastic recycling bins, but only one.
Where in Europe do you have different ones?
Never have encountered those, at least I didn't realize it (in Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland - although with some countries I'm maybe not completely up to date)

The problem is plastic is great for food safety. The way it makes air and water-tight seals, that can easily be broken, is hard to replicate. If cans could open, on their own, the way sealed plastic bottles do, then we could have easier recycling via metal containers. But the self-open cans make sharp edges and nobody's invented a way around that yet.

Recycling only works when the price of the material is high enough to justify the reclamation process. It doesn't work for plastic because of the insane subsidies given to the petroleum industry. If we had a significant enough carbon tax, you'd start seeing more actual plastic recycling.

Recycling has always been a lie to make you feel good about consumption. If it’s not a valuable commodity, it just goes to the dump anyways.