It boggles my mind that modern fast food restaurants don't have a clear board above the multi-receptacle trash area telling you which bin each single-use item they serve goes into.
I mean, maybe that's partly because it doesn't matter and in the end they're just combining it all and sending everything to landfill regardless. But still; they got the bins, how much harder can it be to put up a sign?
Probably, but in that case, they should be honest and just have a single receptacle.
OTOH, fast food joints are possibly one of the handful of places you could actually do recycling right, since you have a pretty uniform stream of items, thus limiting the need to sort. So instead of having a "recycling" bin, they could have a bin for plastic cutlery, and a bin for straws, and a bin for drink lids, with everything else going in a common trash.
Getting thousands of identical contaminated plastic forks that just need a wash before being melted down is probably a lot more appealing to a recycler than getting a bag that's a big jumble of contaminated junk.
I mean, maybe that's partly because it doesn't matter and in the end they're just combining it all and sending everything to landfill regardless. But still; they got the bins, how much harder can it be to put up a sign?