The town I lived in before moving to the farm passed out recycling bins to the residents, in different colors. I think red was for paper, but I'm not sure, because I didn't use the bins. The guys on the truck couldn't have cared less.
The bins were decent quality, and they could be useful for carrying things. They were just plastic boxes without lids. It must have been fun for the recycling guys to carry big boxes of wet paper.
The best thing about the whole business was that the city bought special trucks and hired extra crews...to take the recyclables to the landfill. Because, hello, nobody wants that crap.
Maybe the funniest idea is recycling glass, which is made from sand. I read up on the economics of that genius idea, and they were not good. I haven't kept up with the news. Maybe someone has made glass recycling profitable so we don't exhaust our sand reserves.
At around the time I moved, the city banned plastic straws and grocery bags. If I had stayed, I would have brought my own disposable plastic bags to the grocery, and I would have brought my own plastic straws to restaurants and left them in my glasses when I was done. Tomorrow I'm going to put a few hundred straws in the car in case the wife and I end up in any more situations where they try to force soggy paper straws on us.
Here's a pro tip from someone who takes his own trash to county dumpsters: when you're concerned about what you're throwing out, just hold a legal bag in the hand closest to the nearest attendant, and hold your contraband in your other hand, behind the bag. Then drop them in the dumpster at the same time. Once they're in there, who's to say who dumped what?