Vegas uses privatized sanitation and until last year they only had these tiny open top plastic bins for recycling, so many people don't bother. We'd fill up one of those little bins in a day (3 small kids) and then the wind would tip them over on the street and blow the garbage all over. The sanitation companies finally started switching to new large recycling bins with lids, but it's a city-wide rollout that will take more than a year to avoid fee hikes that would have been necessary to do it quickly. Supposedly if I want a bin early I can pay extra and drive to the nearest recycling center to pick one up, but I'm going to just wait until they drop it off at my house.
In Calif, depending on where you live they have varying degrees of care given to it. In San Diego where my Mom lives, its super easy. They give each house a pretty large covered recycle bin and you can put literally anything recyclable into it. In San Mateo up in the SF Bay area, they go a step farther by not only requiring recycling, they also shrank the size of the "trash" bin to about what would fit into a single lawn and leaf bag. That's all the trash you get for the week without paying a fairly hefty additional fee. Their recycle bins are also the crappy open-top plastic boxes that I hate, but I guess up there its sort of like some religions where they intentionally make things painfully time consuming in order to force you to think about it daily.
rant
Speaking of SF environmentalists... Funny how many NorCal environmentalists claim to be humanists or atheists, yet they live like religious evangelicals including ritual self-flagellation, in-your-face sermons, and other beliefs based on shady pseudo-science. A quick trip to an upscale local market in SF Bay area will bring you in contact with lots of people who claim to have no religion, yet they're wearing $200 hemp sandals, carry spare save-the-whatever pamphlets in their purse/pack "just in case", and have expensive magnetized pendants or crystals hanging around their necks to help align them with the planetary energy flows. And of course very small rubbish bins at home that they helped vote into law, while they sneak excess trash to dumpsters behind the mall driving their gas guzzling SUVs.
/rant
In TX where I was living 2 yrs ago, we had a single large bin for recyclables but it was only paper and soft biomass (food, grass, and hedge trimmings ok, logs and construction wood not ok). Glass and metal recycling required a trip to the dump so most people didn't bother.
