It sounds like you are married to my wife.
I do some token stuff but usually throw stuff in the trash. There is a chance that’s what happens when the truck drops it off later.
In our office there are separate containers for recycling.
One curious person (not me) was staying late one evening and followed the trash out the door to see what happened to the recycle baskets.
It turns out that the cleaning people took all of the recycle baskets and threw them in the regular trash dumpster!
On further research it turned out that the building had no separate place for recycled items.
This has to be happening in millions of locations in the country.