Destined to be burned

A few days ago something in a newspaper caught my eye. It was about trash separation. It said trash separated as recyclable just ended up its life in an incinerator(焼却炉). How can this happen when we are taking all the trouble and time(?) to separate it? Due to technical improvement of incinerators, we do not have to worry any more about poisonous gasses which used to be released from conventional incinerators. Congratulations. We finally got to be able to burn it. And good thing is, the report said, we can even use the heat from the incinerators to generate electricity.
So I read very carefully a leaflet issued by Tokyo municipal government, which instruct how to separate our trash. According to the illustration, there are 3 categories: Resource trash(資源ゴミ), Burnable, and Nonburnable. The items classified as the resource trash category are plastics and the name itself obviously suggests that it will be used as resources hopefully as plastics. The instruction even demands us to rinse the trash of this category if it is tainted with something. So we may well think that the contamination is harmful for those plastics to be born again. We also have to separate PET bottles from other plastic trash. ALL these instructions, any way you look at it, seems to indicate that plastics will be revived as new, young plastics.
To think that it is destined to be burned in incinerators! (I guess PET bottles will enjoy a special treatment and hopefully new life.) I feel cheated. My wife is angry. My mother doesn't want to believe this. My kids are not interested.
I am not sure if the article is true with our district but most probably true because all kinds of plastics except PET are lumped together into one bag whether they be polyethylene or foamed polystyrene. I will investigate on it and report you later.
The picture was taken on a street corner in Zurich, Switzerland. I like this one. It needs no explanation.