A lot of effort has been invested over the past 30-plus years to build waste diversion programs in institutional settings, including colleges and universities, corporate campuses, and government agencies. Even as the public-facing infrastructure for recycling and organics collection expands to match the scope of trash collections, ongoing struggles with contamination and lackluster participation suggest that access alone isn't enough to achieve high recovery rates at institutions. Efforts to educate people help, but there's a growing understanding that part of the problem lies with the collection system itself, with building managers often simply grafting recycling onto a "legacy" collection arrangement designed simply to remove trash efficiently. This has resulted in bin infrastructure and service arrangements that ignore behavioral factors and passively, if not actively, encourage people to sort items incorrectly.
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