You're not wrong, but home diversion isn't entirely pointless. The best tax-funded downstream sorting system is no match for the moldy lasagna covering the scrap paper in your OmniToss Multi-Bin™.
Moving towards a standard where all food waste is compostable (except, probably, metal cans) seems like a big step forward. Food waste is generally the most unpleasant to handle, so its presence makes sorting the remainder of the stream more difficult. In Japan, some municipalities have a special system for food waste:
This sounds like a difficult problem, because compostability and shelf stability are contradictory goals. Pretty much by definition, anything that doesn't break down on a store shelf after a day, is going to pile up in the compost pile. It's not a problem for fresh foods intended to be consumed that day, but if your produce bags were compostable, they would not be very useful.
My produce bags are compostable, and they work fine. For one, they don't need to last very long - you can't keep produce for weeks anyway. For another, they mostly only break down in the environment of a municipal composting system, which gets hot and is quite different from your backyard compost heap.
Grocery stores around where i live in the sf bay area seem to be switching to them. I think they tried earlier, but I'm guessing they were too much more expensive?
Quite a marvel of engineering, from what i can tell.
Your point still stands though - shelf packaging needs to be pretty robust.
