http://economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9249262
Overview of recycling, from which countries recycling the most to where the recycled materials are used. (1) In most places, kerbside recycling isn’t self-financing (i.e. it costs more to recycle material than to dump it; absent full-lifecycle (environmental) arguments there would be no point to it). (2) A large amount of automated sorted is now possible. (Surely won’t be long until the techniques used are able to separate recylables from non-recyclables—?)