They keep hyping plastic recycling issues like it's politically correct.
If minor low cost changes are made to plastic containers beforehand it may be easier than they think to make recycling profitable.
Most industrial separation processes don't have the luxury of designing wha t is going to be separated, i.e. wheat from the chaff, etc., around what wi ll be doing the separation. The designer of the separation process only ha s one side to work with.
The yuge advantage of designing plastic bottles and the waste separation eq uipment around each other could very well be enough to off set the one or 2 order of magnitude lower value/lb of the end product.
The first solution, mostly for explanation purposes here, would be a specia l kind of Velcro where both surfaces are specifically designed only for eac h other. The hooks only fit and hang up on certain size or shape loops des igned only for those hooks. Other Velcros don't work.
Polyethylene bottles would have one size or shape, polyester another, PVC, another, etc.
Other hooks -- and the plastics associated with them -- just fall off the c onveyor belt onto other conveyor belts until all the plastic bottles end up in the right bin.
Optical taggants might be more realistic, even cheaper for the plastic bott le manufacturer as well as the separation equipment manufacturer. Lasers o n the separation machine see the right color reflected from a water bottle and a short compressed air blast knocks it off the conveyor belt. Skippy p eanut butter does something similar with burned peanuts.
These changes could be accomplished without government requirements as it's easy to be politically correct if it doesn't cost over 0.3 cents / bottle.
To keep the bottles clean nano and other surface treatments could keep the catsup from sticking so very little water is necessary to clean the plastic .
Bret Cahill