Good morning!😃 🌸☀️ GERMAN TRASH RULES...what are the trash rules where you live?!🗑 ♻️ Looking forward to learning about more trash differences around Germany and the whole world!😊 As I mentioned at the end of the video, the 3 summer T-shirt designs (Biergarten Bunch, Ice Cream & German Summer) will be available until end of September. Wanted Adventure T-shirts will stay available longer😊 👚👕 You can see all the designs here😊👉 teespring.com/stores/wantedadventure
In my area, we only have a black bin for residual waste, the brown one for organic waste and a Blue one for Paper. If you would like to get rid of the other trash you'll have to bring it away by your self to Recicling place's that are opend to totaly strange Times... So as a Sigle who is a full time worker it's really annoying.(Heilbronn BW)
Paper-bins arround here are Black with a blue top. At our "Wertstoffhof" it is possibil to bring larger ammounts off "green" like grass, or green cuttings also you can bring any kind of building construction waste and also your "Sperrmüll" but for some of the wastes you have to pay a fee. Besides if you bring creen cuttings or grass, you can get compost soil for free.
The green dot is a System that makes money. As long as you pay the license for using the green dot you can print it on your packaging. Even if the way to recycle it is not efficient and wastes more resources than it brings back. E.g. Try to separate the material form a milk box and you will understand.
Wanted Adventure In NRW (maybe not everywhere) we have for residual waste, garbage cans with red, purple, brown or white tops. Organic waste has everytime a green top, paper blue and plastic yellow. But I really don't know why we have so many colors for residual waste 🤷♂️
It's all very complicated! I'm afraid I've been harassed and persecuted by some people I stayed with in Germany. Their excuse for doing this was that I didn't know where to throw away any glass bottles. I decided to play it safe by putting the empty bottles in a cupboard where I saw they had put some empty glass bottles. I thought they would then take them somewhere when a certain amount had accumulated, but apparently this was wrong, and allegedly a big sleight against them. I was eventually sent out to get rid of them, but without enough instructions to find the bin. A neighbour told me "There isn't one here". I eventually dumped them into a small bin atttached to a post on a grass verge where no one was standing nearby watching at the time. I heard the bottles smashing as I dropped each one on top of the other! Of course, I throw away empty glass bottles where I live in London, but that's easy, because I don't have to seperate them from any other stuff. The morale of this story is that people must explain in detail to visitors exactly how and where to throw each type of waste, don't harass them for not knowing!
As someone from the US, I already feel overwhelmed about all the different bins in Germany lol (sidenote: it's also interesting how most of the world calls them "bins," but in the US we call them "cans"). In my county in California, we have 3 bins. A brown one for general garbage, a green one for yard waste (lawn clipings, tree/shrub clippings, etc), and a blue one for recycling. There is no bin for compost. Any food/etc would just get thrown in the brown can with general waste, or go down the garbage disposal (which I know Dana mentioned in another video that Germany doesn't have garbage disposals). Also, you are not required to use the blue recycling bin. While its use is highly encouraged, you will not be fined for putting recyclables in the brown waste bin. You can also opt to take your recyclables into the recycling center yourself. The recycling center will then sort the recycling for you, and actually PAY YOU for the items you bring in (the amount depends on the type of material and the weight). In my experience, I usually get back MORE than the $0.05 deposit that I paid for the containers. For large items (appliances, furniture pieces, etc), my county has free "curbside pickup" where you call the county and schedule an appointment to have the item picked up. On the scheduled day, you just leave the item on the curb and they will come haul it away for you, no charge. Toxic items or dangerous items (such as needles for injections, etc) are not picked up, and you must take them to a hazardous waste facility on your own. Most of these facilities do charge a fee since this kind of waste requires special care and attention.
Hazardous materials are collected without charge, at least in Cologne. One can take it to the waste facility themselves or look up the schedule for the mobile hazardous material collection. Many cities around Cologne have those trucks who show up at regular intervals.
Wait, you didn't mention "gelber Sack", did you? That's where the plastic/Kunststoff stuff goes (in Niedersachsen). Do you put plastic wrappers and such in the general waste bin?
das ist das gleiche wie die gelbe Tonne, die erwähnt wurde. In meiner Region kommt auch alles in den Gelben Sack, in anderen eben in die gelbe Tonne :)
phénix I was wandering that too. Around Stuttgart where I'm from we have the "gelbe Sack" as well. But around Karlsruhe which isn't that far away they have the "Wertstofftonne" and in there go all kinds of packaging (which includes paper as well as plastic if you don't have a "blaue Tonne").
I am from Ecuador and we don't recycle anything 😔 Last year, I went to visit my aunt that lives in Switzerland and I was amazed by their recycling system. I wish we had that here.
where I am from (Lower Saxony), its common that around Sperrmüll time, people from Poland drive around in white/yellow/blue vans and come to pick up some of your trash for their usage. That's why you need to be careful when you put anything on the sideways that's not trash, cause they might take it with them :D
Sperrmüll scavengers are common in Cologne too. Some are organized groups looking for metal or electronics or anything that can be fixed and resold later, either on the Internet or at flea markets, and there is of course those organized groups that take the collected stuff to their country, like Poland. And there are always individuals looking for stuff that people want to clean/fix and use themselves in their homes. There is one problem though. Rules in Cologne are: any Sperrmüll that is on private ground is the owners property and taking it is theft and the trash collector won't take it either. It must be deposited in a neat pile on common property, usually the curb, in order to be collected. Any Sperrmüll that is put out on the curb to be collected by the trash collector is the trash collecting company's property and taking it away is theft. I have never heard of people getting fined or prosecuted for taking something of the trash pile, but it is clearly stated that it is theft and it is forbidden to take anything away.
Here in a small town near the border to the netherlands we had these people driving around too. And because it's a small, pretty conservative town people were complaining about them. So the city changed the system and now you have to order a truck picking up your stuff. And you need to list exactly what items you have. At least it's free for two times a year. Still it sucks
What! Ich vermisse Sperrmüll Zeiten in Hamburg.Ein Spass für mich als Kind,jetzt verboten(anmelden,was,Menge,nicht an der Strasse,Kosten für Abholung.Für alle Mieter machen)
I live in an apartment complex in NW Indiana. We have trash dumpsters....and nothing else. Basically, anything and everything go into these dumpsters, unless you want to drive your recyclables to the recycling center at the government complex. I do take my recyclables to the recycling center (which is just a row of green dumpsters), where they have what is known as 'single stream recycling'. That means everything goes into the dumpsters together - cardboard, newspapers, plastics, aluminum, glass, etc. Obviously, they have some way to separate it out later, but I don't know exactly how. Our recycling center used to be in a different location, but because it wasn't visible from the road, people were dumping all kinds of large trash (mattresses, for example) into the bins. The city then moved the center to the government complex to allow the police and government employees to keep a better eye on it. Since they moved it, I have only ever seen actual recyclables in the dumpsters (yay!).
In HAMBURG we have green bins for organic waste (flowers, lawn clippings, food scraps, etc.); black bins with a blue top for carton and dry paper; yellow bins for small pieces of metal, combined plastic/metal pieces, plastic with the green dot. Some large housing complexes have their own glass containers, but for most of us they are situated at a random crossroad in the area (white, brown and green glass to be seperated, only to be used for disposal between 7am and 7 pm). Usually there is also a paper/carton container at that crossroad to be used by inhabitants of small houses/family homes who don't have the above-mentioned "black bin with a blue top". Some years ago they started introducing another container with a small opening for "small electronics" (= sandwich makers, hairdryers, etc.). "Unwieldy garbage" (the famous "Sperrmüll" = sofas, chairs, mattresses, etc., but also large electric appliances like microwave ovens, fridges, washing machines, dishwashers, tv sets, as well as dangerous stuff like batteries, chemicals, paint, etc. and large amounts of organic waste) have to be taken to the "Recyclinghof". One can also phone the waste disposal department to pick the "Sperrmüll" up, but they charge per cubic meter and the minimum you need (for them to come at all) is quite large, so one usually teams up with neighbours to share the cost. (It has to be taken into one basement though, for them to think it's from one person 😉). Last, but not least: we only pay for our black bins with a black top (for whatever does not fit into the above-mentioned categories/bins/containers or whatever one is unsure about), so recycling a lot of stuff actually saves money, because if everybody does it in a given building, that building needs small black bins only (which are much cheaper than the large ones). Unfortunately, however, the system is quite complicated and whenever one moves to another part of the country, one has to graduate in garbage disposal all over again ...
We in Austria (Vienna) use red for paper, blue for metal, yellow for plastic, brown for organic waste, white/green for white/colored glass and black for general waste. Except the general waste bins, all others are green and only the top cover is colored. We also have free recycling yards (called Mistplatz) where you can bring nearly everything to. At some places you can even get some compost for free (half of a cubic meter if I'm right)
Hi Dana, You missed to mention that old electronic devices, energy saving lamps (fluorescent tubes) and batteries have to be brought back to stores which sell them. They contain precious metals and harmful substances which need to be collected and recycled separately from the normal trash. For old clothes it is recommended to put them into the 'Altkleidercontainer' or to shops like Oxfam which resell them for a good cause. And there is definitely a misunderstanding in the plastic - you are supposed to dispose all plastic trash (plastic bags, wrapping foil etc. - no difference whether small or big in size) into the plastic containers. It is not supposed dispose plastic into the general household trash. But you can dispose the special organic trash bags into the organic trash bin.
In Kiel, we have yellow bin (for the green dot stuff), black bin with a green lid for biological waste, a blue paper bin and a black remaining trash bin. Also we are allowed to use paper bags or organic bag material for the biological waste. However, not allowed are plastic bags which are advertised as being bio degradable, but are actually made out of oil (allowed are bags conforming to EN 13432, if I am not mistaken).
I live in a 500-person village in Bavaria and we have another kind of trashcollecting: the "Altpapiersammlung". Members of our sports club rent a truck 3 times a year and drive around with it to collect paper waste (old newspapers, ...). AND they collect money for the club by doing this for each kg so there are only 1 or 2 blue bins in the whole village because everyone is collecting paper waste for the "Altpapiersammlung".
For Austria: black: general waste red: paper blue: cans brown: organic (no bags) yellow: PET bottles (there is no Pfand) white: clear glass green: green glass yellow bag (not in Vienna): plastics some stores: batteries / CDs Recyclinghof: everything else
In Slovenia we have a green container for general trash, a container with yellow lids, where we put plastic and cans and the brown container where we put organic trash. Than we have Eco islands, where we put glass in red container, paper in blue and cans and plastic in yellow. Also somewhere we have special containers where we put items that you can not trow in general trash (electric appliances and similar stuff).
Recyclinghof is also nice if you have a garden. Fallen leaves, grass, or you perhaps removed a small tree - you can bring all that stuff to the Recyclinghof too.
I'm living in a county in western germany.. next to the dutch border. We don't have those huge bins for glass but every household owns 3 little green plastic boxes for glas. These are being picked up once a quarter.
Wanted Adventure yeah.. it's definitely a regional thing. If I just go to Duisburg (40 km away) they already have those huge bins standing around on parking lots. I prefer those.. they don't block space in my garage. :)
You prefer the large bins until you have to dispose of glass in the late summer or early autumn. You throw in the first piece of glass and out comes an angry swarm of wasps chasing you to death because you interrupted their feeding frenzy.
Hmm.. that never happened to me. Ok.. the smell is disgusting in the summer time because a lot of people don't clean the glass before throwing it in. But that's something I can live with. :D
Hello Dana, even if sperren means blocking, in this case i think the sperr in Sperrmüll comes from Sperrig (groß und unhandlich) (big and unwieldy/cumbersome/unmanageable) And here in Kaiserslautern Sperrmüll and Elektrogeräte is free, you just have to call vor a date. Have a nice time
I'm from switzerland, and here, you recycle sooooo much more 😅 The aludose from the redbull, or the lid of your yoghurt? Went into the alu-trash. The carton of your milk or juce? Went intl the special-carton-trash. Of course, we have the "usual" stuff like PET-trash, green-trash, glas-trash, electro-trash, normal-trash, carton-trash, paper-trash...
BassaSelim Redbull doesn't cost pfand... Maybe in germany, but here in switzerland, we don't have (or rarely have) pfand 😉 And there's no green dot on the yoghurt or milk or juce 🤔
Recently, in my city in Alabama was added ; cooking oil recycling . There is a mesh cabinet with several five gallon jugs to pour in used cooking oil . The used oil is made into Diesel fuel to be used in city trucks.
What came to my mind is, that if you have a pet like a dog, you have to collect the "shit". There are free "bags" for it everywhere. You can leave it in the bins in the area. If you get caught not to do it, you can get a panality.
We throw yellow plastic bags into the big yellow bin. In some areas of Germany (I think in smaller towns or villages like my hometown) you just have to put the bags on the side of the street and a garbage truck will collect them. But it happens just twice a month 😂
As I recall, the origin of the German "green dot" was a piece of legislation requiring manufacturers to take back plastic wrapping in order to reduce plastic waste and unnecessary packaging. Of course, neither manufacturers nor retailers wanted to have to deal with returned waste, so they formed a new company to collect this waste, requiring a fee to put a "green dot" on your packaging. And the plague of unnecessary plastic packaging is still raging unabated.
I live in Austin, Texas and recycling is very optional. Most of the apartment complexes have several big dumpsters for regular trash and only a few bins (like the kind of black bins you mentioned in your video) that are designated for recycling. Those recycling bins generally have a simple picture list of what can go into the bins. On the street corners downtown, there are public trash cans as well as an equal number of recycling cans, but on those recycling cans, there is no picture list of what is recyclable. I also work in the service industry, and it has been my experience that it depends on the restaurant whether or not you recycle. Currently, I work at an upscale restaurant and we recycle with blue bins (no picture list) and we put trash in the black bins. When I worked at a local restaurant, we did the same but we also composted all of the food and napkins in those special compostable bags you mentioned in the video. That restaurant had equal sized dumpsters for trash, recycling, and compost. However, when I worked at the airport, we only threw things in the trash can. I can't remember ever having seen a recycling can in the airport.
In hesse: Altkleidersammlung - old clothing and rags, Christmastrees get a separate Collection. When in a Recyclingyard, you can seperate Sperrmüll into Wood, Electronic and devices containing cooling liquid. Tires and car-batteries can be sold back at any store, they have to take it back and give you a fixed price. I think they are giving them to a special retailer and get even some more money out of this. I am not sure what i got for my old car-battery, i think it had been 10€.
I'm from a small city near Naples. They come every day to our houses and we must follow a calendar for each category. They take: -Paper (printed paper, newspapers, tetrapak... NO oiled paper) -Plastic and metal (only recyclable plastic, so for example PE, PET, PS... there's a list and metal of couse, typically food cans) -Glass (every colour, NO ceramic) -Food waste (it also include dirty paper like pizza boxes, tree leaves) -Trash-trash (diapers, tampons, ... fun stuff) But we also have a recycling yard (isola ecologica) where you can bring everything if you missed the day (except for food waste, but its pickup-frequency is high so it's not a big deal), you can call for big things and you can go there to deposit used oil (it's recycled as soap and biodisel) and get new bags if you need them. . . . we come a long way :)
I have experience of both trash systems in the UK in cities and in a town in Poland near Warsaw. In England, I've lived in 2 counties and it goes like this: County 1: You have 4 bins, 1 for any glass, cans, paper & clothes or other similar materials - this is a small black box and, the products have to be clean and not packaged in plastic bags etc. There is also a black large bin which can collect just any house waste in black bin bags. There is another large recycling bin, the size of the waste bin, which again is loose without any bags, and you put clean cardboard and plastic products such as milk bottles, butter containers, meat packaging. Again, everything is meant to be clean. Finally there is a garden waste bin but here you have to pay for this additionally (£40 for the year), which is on top of the council tax which is already supposed to pay for your bin collection... County 2: 3 bins, 1 quite small container for scraps of food, so vegetable peelings etc. This is easy to open and the local foxes are very happy, however not the residents. This gets collected weekly. Then there are 2 bins, one slightly smaller for your household waste & one slightly bigger for all recycling mentioned above, but this time it is together. This is collected on alternate weeks - this county is very harsh and if the bin lid is even slightly open (because the bin is very full), the bin men will not collect the rubbish. In Poland in a flat: There is a special outbuilding which is locked & you have a special key (to keep out the homeless), and in here you drop all of your household waste whenever it gets full at home, and this isn't really very carefully monitored, so if you're not one for recycling, nobody will know. In a block area of 7 buildings of roughly 30 flats each, this gets collected every morning. Outside of this outhouse there are also containers for recycling glass & plastic - there is 2 containers for green glass, and one for clear glass from what I remember. Now I have written all this I realise how nobody will probably read this... But I cannot bring myself to delete it now :P Great video Dana, really interesting to learn about this difference!
Actually, your explanation of the yellow bin is not entirely correct. It used to be only for items with the "green dot" (Grüner Punkt) on them, but not anymore. Nowadays it's for plastic packaging waste in general (although only packaging, not other plastic things). And at least in some areas metal cans also go into the yellow bin/bag (some areas have Gelbe Tonne, others have Gelber Sack). The "green dot" is not official anymore and may or may not be present on the packaging.
Where I am, in the US, there are two kinds of cans ( rubber bins ) two Black for general trash and one blue for all recycling. In the Blue cans you can mix Metal, Glass, Paper, plastic but it should be clean. Yard waste can be put in brown paper bags and placed in the black cans. You don't have to use the recycling, but if you do use it, do not put dirty paper or plastic in the blue can (like pizza boxes). Scrap metal can be collected from next to the cans. Trash is collected weekly, recycling every two weeks.
i can't believe i just made it this early to this video lol i had to laugh when my bff and her mom got in the car, pulled over on some strange side street, and took the recycling and started sorting everything into like 6 different dumpster type things.... like you said, right down to the color of glass. my mind was blown loooool made me feel bad. like here we are in philly throwing out almost everything, yet in munich the citizens literally do the sorting of recyclables, themselves. so freaking cool. #7monthsuntilMunichmovein #cantwaittobepartofyourworld #iwannabewheretherecyclersare 😂
+christina castaldi At the Munich airport there's only one bin for everything, but I noticed that on the side of the trash cans it says something like "don't worry about sorting your trash, we'll do it for you!" letting people know that they can just throw all their trash into that one bin without worry, it will get sorted out later😊
Wanted Adventure lol man i wish i saw that! being in munich airport by myself was quite.....intimidating so once i got to my gate, i just stayed there so i didn't get lost lololol
In Langen, Hessen (not to be confused with Langenhessen): Weissglas, Grünglas, Weissblechdosen. I don't remember what colors the bins are. In the boonies of North Carolina where I live: There's a "convenience center" with two compactors (one is roped off at a time) for household trash, a skip for recyclage (usually closed since they put in a standalone compactor), another skip or two for furniture, and a standalone compactor for recyclage. All kinds of recyclable plastic are accepted, but not bags. I separate metal lids from glass jars. Once I brought a dead compact fluorescent to the convenience center and asked the man what to do with it. He told me to just put it in household trash. I told him that one MUST NOT EVER put a fluorescent in the household trash, because it could break and release mercury. After some thought, I called the dentist, who has a device to capture mercury vapor from drilling fillings. So I brought the dead bulb to his office.
Hey. I always watch your videos because it is fun to see how different west Germany is from bavaria. I was born and raised close to Düsseldorf so I only know that area. But since it would be boring to repeat your trash facts, I will tell you about my new home! When I lived in Kyoto we had to separate burnable trash, not burnable trash, plastic bottles, cans, glass, paper and compostable trash. There were special trash bags which you had to buy at your local supermarket or convenience store, don't you dare using any other bags! Oh, and don't forget to rip off the label of your bottles and take off the lid. Paper was stacked and taken to it's designated place. We were handed a schedule for the pickup days of each trash and had to put the bags in the trash area in front of the house late at night or early in the morning. Of course you must not take out burnables when it was compostable day! As for "Sperrmüll", you have to call them to your house and get it picked up. Here in Tokyo no one seems to care. Maybe it's just this ward, though. I don't know. The only thing that's interesting here is, that there is a trash room in this building where you put everything. There are boxes for bottles and cans and a place to put you paper but you don't have to bother and separate it. Next week we're moving to the neighboring city. I hope the trash rules are easy to understand! As for a general trash fact for japan: always carry a plastic bag with you as it is really hard to find trash bins in public areas! Even parks don't really have any. Your are supposed to take your trash home.
Compostable bioplastic organic waste bags are allowed in the Biomüll, but only if they are more than 50% biobased and certified according to EN 13432. But even if they are, each county can still decide individually if they allow these bags. That's why nobody uses them. The Recycling Lobby doesn't want a lot of bioplastics in the waste stream, because their systems are not designed for these new kind of plastics. The compost facilities also fear more regular plastic in the Biomüll if they allow bioplastics.
Here in Austria the colours are these way: black is for general waste, red is for paper, blue is for metal, brown for organic waste, yellow for plastic, white for transparent glass and green for coloured glass. In Austria as well you have to pay attention to the time: you can trash your glass generally between 6 and 22. Regarding big waste (such as forniture for instance) or electronic waste there is surely a hotline that you can call, but I've never used it so I don't know how it exactly works
Where I live (the Netherlands) we used to have a bin for general waste (black), organic trash (brown or green) and paper (blue). Plastic and glass had to go in a large bin in the neighbourhood. However, rules recently changed and now the black bin is for recyclables (cans, all plastic, juice/milk cartons) and we have to bring our general waste to the large bin. This really stimulates recycling as no one likes walking in the street with a sack of trash. You're lucky with different trash rules from state to state. Here it's regulated differently in every town.
In the cities where i lived in North Rhine Westphalia you always can throw big plastic and aluminium bins in the yellow trash bin or yellow sack. And i never heard, that Sperrmüll cost you anything! And from my hometown Bochum i know that only normal trash and construction waste will cost you money to dispose of.
Brussels here. Similar as in Germany, with a blue bags for recyclables (but only plastic bottles, cans and drink cartons), a yellow plastic bag (yes...) for clean paper and cardboard), a white bag for the rest, and optionally, an orange bag for organic trash and a green bag for garden waste, such as mowed grass. We have glass containers, and more and more often, they are underground, to avoid the noise problem you mentioned. In theory, you can't throw any glass at night, but anarchists as we are, we mostly don't care.
hey guys .... here in NRW-Wuppertal area we have yellow bins if u have ur own house and yellow bags if u live in a flat that u get for free from the Hof but only 1roll a 12 bags per person a year, we dont have these big taxi colored containers here and our paper bin is green not blue. We also have the Sperrmull thats for free u can choose an apointment and some towns give u one. And the best bit ..... while living in Rheinland-Pfalz once in a while a dustbin suit man would come 30 min before the truck came and check EVERY bin ... he could empty it on ur garden and check all things in it and if he would find ONE thing that didnt bellong in there he would put a BIG FAT RED STICKER on the front of ur bin so allllll the neighbours could see ur a looser in recycling!!!!
Where I am in Australia, we have three dark green bins. One has a red top which is for general waste, one has a yellow top which is for recycling (all recycling goes in here. Cans, glass etc) then we have a light green topped bin for natural waste, e.g grass clippings, foliage etc. We can also dump things at what we call "the tip" which is a junkyard, in all different sections from general waste right through to scrap metal and white goods. 😊
Here, next to Bergheim, you can really order a truck from the trash office for free, but you have limited space that they take with them. And at the city has a"trash collector" place but you have to pay for the most (not for electronic)
i believe trash sorting has been removed around bucharest. o.o at least in my area. there used to be 3 colored bins: yellow for paper, green for plastic, blue for glass? or something of the sorts. but the pictures on them and the openings made it quite clear which one was for which. it seems romania doesn't like sorting out the trash anymore. so everything goes out as general waste :(
We have different Recycling Systems here each County/ City (Ba-Wü). Most common is Gelber Sack, yellow bag. Which is same as you are using yellow bin, but no fill Limits. A bin is full when it is full. Gelber Sack, in this case plural, gelbe Säcke, you can leave as many you want. There is a schedule, they pick up gelber Sack in period of every 2 weeks (here Mondays). The Restmüll and all others you've mentioned is same. Sperrmüll is once in Spring a big Collection, and also scheduled. And you have an Option, for free, to call them twice a year to pick your Sperrüll and getting an Appointment then when they will come. In fact that gelber Sack has no amount Limits, i think it is regulated by the Basic fee. Could be generally higher than yours, i guess.
I'm from Bamberg, Upper Franconia, and here it's Restmüll/black, Paper/green, Organic/brown. (I'm living on the countryside, and my friends in the city have blue paper bins!) We do not have the yellow plastic bin, but we have the "gelber Sack"/yellow bag. Also, Sperrmüll comes from "sperrig"/bulky, not from "sperren"/block ;) It's just a tiny difference,but I thought I could point it out. Our Recyclinghof has a metal container, too, no matter how big the item. And many may find German rules rather crazy, but the thing is that our country is really densely populated and those ridiculous seeming rules are necessary to make living together as pleasant as possible (also it's better for the environment) :D
We live near Hannover in Lower Saxony. General Trash is the same here. Organic waste is a green bin here but personal we don't have one because we have a "Kompost" in our garden, meaning we recicle it ourself. Plastic is collected in "Gelbe Säcke" (yellow bags). Wish we had bins for that too, because the bags are really thin and they tear quite often. For paper it's the same here: blue bin. But when I was a kid, we hadn't had that. Paper was collected in a central container like the glas. For Sperrmüll we have like two free tickets per year here. With these tickets you can either bring it to the Recyclinghof or you can let someone pick it up at your home. Both is for free. If you don't have a free ticket anymore you have to pay it. All other trashs like metal or electric stuff you have to bring to the Recyclinghof as well. But we have these "Schrotthändler" who drive around to pick up bigger metalic trash too 😅
I live in the mountains of Virginia, and we must bring our trash to a trash collection place that is open everyday until 5:00 PM, except Sundays. I used to live in Northern Virginia, right outside of D.C. and we had a trash pick up every Wednesday. We had one bin for recycling and one bin for trash. We also had a list of what we could and couldn’t recycle.
Where I grew up, the trash rules were similar to what you explained. I recently moved to another area in Germany and well, things are very different here. We also have the Restmüll and organic trash. But then we divide it in "rund" and "flach". Rund is everything like glass, juice-packages, Joghurt-Packages and stuff like this. Flach is paper and plastic foil.
In Potsdam, the main city of the state of Brandenburg, "Sperrmüll" is free for two times a year. You have to call the trash office and they give you an appointment later. Interesting fact: From the moment on you put your "Sperrmüll" on the street, it is no longer your property, cause it belongs now to the town. Nevertheless you often see people looking through the "Sperrmüll" of others to see, if there is something, they can still use. The same the other way round: Some people notice, there is "Sperrmüll" and they add their own stuff to it. The problem is, you've called the trash office and said, how much you'll be putting on the street. So when others take or add something, the amount of your "Sperrmüll" no longer matches the amount you announced. In serious cases of deviation the trash office may charge you additional fees.
In my region of Belgium ( Mechelen ) we have 4 collections of garbage : 1) "restafval" (Restmüll) every 2 weeks in black containers, costs about 63€ a year 2) PMD which stands for "Plastic, Metaal & Drankartons" in transparant blue bags and may only contain plastic bottles like for water, lemonade, shampoo + metal cans from beer, sofdrinks, conserved products + paper containers for milk, soup, juice. This collected at the same time as general garbage but free of charge. 3) Paper, put in a carton box (one can use whatever box you have) : this is collected every 4 weeks, also free. 4) "General plastic" put in transparant pink bags may only contain buttertrays, yoghurt pots, plastic wrappers, plastic bags, etc. This collected every 8 weeks and also free. All the rest of garbage like wood, grass, used electronics, paint, motor oil, glass, building debris, metals ... we have to bring ourselves to the "container park" which exists in every town. Once inside you have to deposit every kind of garbage in their specific container, so you better sort things out before you go.
Very good video. Here in the New Orleans area, we haven't got as organized a system and things just get pitched out, which is a shame. Here in a suburb and not the same county as New Orleans, we have two bins: One large black bin for garbage (all garbage) and a small recycle bin (mostly for plastics, newspapers, etc.). Twice a week a recycle truck comes around and tosses everything into the back of a trash truck. There's no sorting by the recycling collectors, so it is one big pile of everything in the trucks. What they do after this is beyond me. Later on the same days, the regular trash truck comes through and takes all remaining bagged garbage from the black bin and crushes the materials. Big items, such as broken furniture, etc., may stay on the sidewalk for a week, until another truck takes those items away. The system directly in New Orleans is almost identical. It is a sad system but the one the exists.
in my city there are 4 bins: paper trash, plastic trash, biologic trash and everything else. for the biologic ones, you are allowed to place that extra made biologic bags inside. why shouldnt u be allowed to do that? and in our plastic bin you can put every kind of plastic, even cans. so you dont have to look at the green point. our recyclinghof is also for free. i think the appearence of these big plastic bins located next to the glass ones depends on what kind of bins you have next to the houses. at our flat at first we didnt have a plastic bin. so there was one located next to the glass. then they added this and the big one was gone.
Here in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) we have 3 bins, blue for certain plastics (same as in the USA you have to check the list of what kind of plastic can go there), aluminum, and non refundable glass, green for food left overs or items that can be used as compost (they can go in the bags that are designed to bio-degrade) and the black bins for the rest. Dangerous garbage, old batteries you can take them to the city yard and is free of charge, old mattresses, lumber wood, old appliances and other garbage can be taken to the yard where your car is weighted before and after going to the yard and you are charged by weight (minimum charge is $5.00), or you can call the city to get a tag in order for them to collect it or on certain dates (after holidays) where there is no limit on the amount of garbage that can be put out. The pickup schedule is bi-weekly for the blue and black bins and weekly for the green.
In the southwest of Germany we actually have 2 green bins in houses in downtown of bigger cities. One for paper and one for glas. But we don't have the yellow bins for plastic. Instead, we get free big yellow plastic bags at some official places to put the plastic trash in. We have to put those bags on the street every 2 weeks, where the city picks them up.
We get 2 large bins, one for all recycling and the other for everything else. It's weird to put my paper in with all the glass, plastic and aluminium, but apparently it works. Great video!
Where i live, there is a black (or dark grey) bin for general waste, blue for (dry and clean) paper and the "gelbe Sack" for waste with the "Grüner Punkt" on it. And there are glas containers and recycling yards, too. we can bring our metal trash to the resycling yard, so there is no collecting truck or something. And we can order two (or so) free collections of "Sperrmüll" per year. LG, Freaky
I live in Roanoke, Virginia and we have one pale blue bin the same size as the trash bin, everything, all glass, all plastics, all paper, everything (that has the appropriate recycling symbol) goes in (no bulk items) and is picked up twice monthly. We are allowed 10 trips per year per household to the bulk waste center at no cost. The waste management center separates everything for us, couldn't be simpler.
In my suburb in Australia, there are three bins, green lid for garden waste (no food scraps), yellow lid for all recyclables (including plastics, depending on what number is on them) and red lid (all black for old bins) for general waste. Sperrmüll is called hard rubbish. In some places it happens a few times per year. In others you have to book it and it's free up to a few times a year. Details vary by local government.
In Dortmund I haven't seen any of these general plastic or aluminium containers so far except at the recycling yard. Sperrmüll here is charged with 20€. The amount of Sperrmüll is also limited by what could fit into one single room and only household inventory is allowed. So if you want to recycle 20 Europaletten they'll tell you that you've to go to a recycling yard. Normally they're really nice and take more as they have to, but it can happen, that they won't take everything although it was on the list or try to double charge you afterwards because it was so much. Another problem in some areas here is, when you order the Sperrmüll, some people take this as an invitation the get rid of their Sperrmüll for free and later you're the one that still has trash on his yard because they took only what was on the list. Some types of waste at the recycling yard here can be thrown away for free. For others like Bauschutt (building rubble?) you'll have to pay. The rest of the waste management seems pretty identical, but you didn't mention the Altkleider Container. They are normally maintained by the church. There're big beige containers, that are run by the Caritas (catholic church) and recently new metal containers that are located together with the glass containers that are run by the Diakonie (protestant church)
I´m from Germany and live in a little village, where is a Place for example the glass, bigger plastic, Sperrmüll, usw., but its just opened on wednesday and saturday. The "normal" trash will be fetched on thursday and friday. Sorry for my bad english XD.
where i live in central north carolina we've got two bins. the green bin is for trash and the brown bin is for recycling. we've always thought the colors ought to be the other way around but it is what it is lol. trash gets picked up every week and recycling is every other week. there's also places you can drive to that are dumps specifically for things like electronics or for big waste like large pieces of equipment, broken furniture, tree branches, things like that. also in the fall the town does leaf pickup when they come for the trash where you can leave your bagged leaves out by the road next to your cans and they'll take them away.
Where I grew up, the bins for organic waste used to be green (now they only have a green lid and black bottom). Also, since we had a paper factory nearby, be had to collect old paper in large cardbord boxes which then got collected by sport clubs or other local social clubs. In other towns, paper had to be brought to big paper containers similiar to glass.
I'm from Ruhrgebiet and I can tell, we don't have the plasticbins, BUT you can put all the plastic here on the yellowbin, not only the stuff with the green dot. Litteraly everything made from plastic.
One big difference between Germany and The San Francisco Bay Area is that dirty / wet paper, such as greasy pizza boxes can go in the compost bin. We have large combined mixed glass, paper and plastics bins and a compost bin. along with a tiny trash bin. You put used batteries in a bag on top of the recycling bin. Toxic items can be labeled and put out separately on trash day. Right now I'm visiting Phoenix where they STILL haven't banned plastic shopping bags! I had to recycle a couple ancient tube TV's here. Best Buy has a free e-waste program but I would have to PAY $25.00 per TV! Lucky after driving 15 miles to the city recycling program I had to pay $5.00 per set. Back home in San Francisco if you didn't bring your bags you have to pay $0.25 per paper bag. Or take all your groceries lose in the cart to your car. You also avoid the withering looks from your cashier and fellow shoppers.
In Belgium, the time of "spermüll" has sadly gone, now you be to bring everything to the recycling center yourself, and even pay for the stuff they don't make profit from (sometimes after a certain treshold). F.e. getting rid of a mattress costs about €1 per 12kg, but you're allowed to bring 2000 kg in organic waste to the recycling center per year, anything more gets charged too. Bringing metal is still free (otherwise it would be silly as we also have scrapyards paying to get your metal). The glass container situation is pretty much like in Germany, and we also have a lot of refund bottles. As for the trash that's picked up at our front door: there's the paper and cardboard collection, the PMD bag and the rest waste. Here PMD stands for PET plastics, metal containers (like cans) and "drinkkartons" aka brick packs. They're also experimenting with allowing more plastic types in the PMD bag, but the sorting centers need to be able to handle this.
In Berlin, we have these yellow bins as well, even from the same recycling company (ALBA), but we are allowed to put any old packaging waste into them without having to look at whether it has a green dot or not. Anything that's recyclable, including, but not limited to, plastic and aluminium, can be put in there. I think even smaller electronic devices go in there, as long as they don't have batteries inside them (anything up to the size of a toaster or a hair dryer maybe). On the other hand, we don't have free Sperrmüll pickup, which accounts for the fact that people just put out their old furniture or household appliances out on the street, which is quite the nasty thing. So politicians are talking about reintroducing free Sperrmüll pickups once a year or so. We do have those free recycling yards here, too, but many people don't have a car or sometimes not even a drivers license, so they have no means of transporting their trash to the recycling yard.
I have my special experience with recycling yards in munich. When bringing some old furniture to a recycling yard in munich, they refused to take it. It was a recycling yard operated by the city of munich, but because of where I live I may only use the recycling yards of the district of munich. I understood that they can't offer a free service for someone not from their area because it is funded by local tax, but it wasn't even possible to pay for it and leave it there.
i love how you are talking about stuff that seems totally normal, like so normal i dont even think about it. and you are making a whole video out of it. bringing your trash to the recycling Hof
There are yellow bins in Hamburg, where I live, and we call them Verpackungsmüll (Packaging bins/Packaging trash). And the organic bin is green over here which makes a *lot* more sense!
J. H. Warum macht denn bitte grün mehr Sinn? Ich meine Organuschen heißt ja nicht immer Grünzeug. Und das meiste, das man da rein tut ist ja alt also braun und matschig.
In New Orleans the large black bins are marked for Trash and smaller bins also black are marked Recyclables. They tell you which is which. You do have to call the city to schedule a pickup for mattresses, electronic items and such that don't fit in the bin and for rubble and debris. It's free for the collection though if you put it out more than 24 hours ahead of time you can be fined. Also they prefer trash to be in bags before being binned. It's a lil' complicated to explain.☺️
Austria: Black bin: General waste (like PE plastic packaging, meat or bones, dirty/wet/fatty paper, hygiene products) Black/Green bin with yellow top: PET plasic bottles (only PET) Green with red top: Clean paper, cardboard Brown: Organic waste (except meat, oil/large amounts of fat, hot ash) Not everywhere: Metal containers with one green and one white flap: Glass (clear/coloured) One for all sorts of metal cans (I can't recall how it looks like) Batteries, electronics and oil are special waste, most supermarkets will pick up the former, your city the latter two
I work for a trash / recycling company in germany. Even the People living here get confused of how to proper recycle. And almost no one is aware that there is bureaucracy behind it. People get very angry when we dont empty their bins after they didnt sort their stuff properly... But I cant help it. You are not recycling for me, you are doing it for the environment. (I just noticed my bad english here.... sorry!)
Recyclables are supposed to be separated from the trash where I'm from, but I think it's collected all together grr -_- but the aluminium soda cans are kept separate and we personally take them to the recycling plant and can be paid for them, so we collect them up for a long time and then bring lots of bags to the plant and they weigh it and we get a few bucks for extra spending money
In Washington state we have 3 bins, Trash, recycling, and compost/yard waste. They are black, blue and green respectively. Plastic, metal, glass and clean paper go in recycling. Food waste, yard waste and food soiled papers go in compost. And everything else goes in trash. Sounds a lot more complicated in Germany
In Ireland it depends which trash company you are with some have glass bins (normaly red), most company's have brown compost bin (some take cooked food some don't) , blue recycling bins (some take more materials than other .. examples some take food tins and some don't ) and plain black or black with a green lid for general waste. In towns you can find the glass bins same as yours and sometimes tin/can bins . My family gave up using trash company's about 8years or so ago. They go to the recycling centre(like your yard) it cost €3 for a car entry, we have so many bins there are 5 plastic bins ( hard plastic, pet 1 , 2 , mixed other plastic , soft plastic) there is a bin for bottle tops, a food tin bin, cans bin, metal bin, cardboard, paper, different glass bins, batterie bin, small electric wire bin, wood bin, polystyrene bin, paint bin, electric appliance(costs extra depending on size) , matress(€20 each ) you can also bring general waste and they weight it and charge you. I believe there are more little charges for other things there but I don't know all of them
No plastic or aluminum bins on the streets where I live (north of Stuttgart). You are allowed to throw aluminum _cans_ into the glass bin. The rest, along with all the plastic, you have to take to the Recyclinghof (every municipality has at least one of these). They also take old batteries and electronics waste there, but for your bulky waste, you have to go another place, the Kreismülldeponie (of which there are two in the county). Or you can have it picked up a few times a year.
My county in Baden-Württemberg just recently introduced organic bins, but they have trouble catching on and oftentimes they will attract crows. I have no idea why this doesn't seem to be an issue in other counties, but it is here. So the government has made them optional - which means no one really uses them. At least no one I know.
Robin of Hood First of all, I don't live in Stuttgart, I live BY Stuttgart... In a totally different county (Kreis). Secondly, I said "crows" not "cows".
I live 50 kilometers from Cologne. Here we have not the yellow bin, but the yellow sack. We have to apply for Sperrmüll and we will get an appointment when the stuff will be picked up. The whole cost then between 15 € and 18 €. The other garbage regulations are just like in Munich. I think we in Germany have rules for almost everything.
Possibly interesting fact about the history of the yellow bin/bag: back in the 90s the government wanted to reduce trash from packaging. So they mandated that any packaging can be returned to the shop where you bought the item. As an alternative, the producers of packaging invented the Grüner Punkt (green recycling symbol) where the cost for recycling a package is included in the licensing fee for the Grüner Punkt symbol which is lower for more recycling friendly packaging. So consumers can return any package with that symbol in the yellow bin/bag without paying for the bin. But if your yellow bin is full and you still have room in your regular bin (for which you do pay), you can put these items in there as well. In most areas, yellow and black bins are treated the same (i.e. remove any metal then burn the rest), the difference is just who pays for the bin.
Where I live in the uk we have a brown bin for the general waste and a green bin for all the recycling as in paper, plastic, aluminium, glass etc all in one bin
I recently bought bread in a paper bag with a transparent window in it - which had the instruction to give it to the waste paper. Instinctively I would rather put it into packaging because there's plastic, but apparently there are types of plastic that can go into paper recycling. The problem with having to bring oversized rubbish to the recyclinghof is - what do you do when you don't have a car? It's easy for the city, they don't need to send a truck around with strong men to lift that bulky furniture in, but then it can be a logistic problem to move these things around, and renting a van for it is costly.
Now that I am in rural MN, there is only one recycling container and one trash/garbage container. When I lived in Clifton, NJ, which was for most of my life, there was no recycling pickup but there was a town recycling center and we dumped everything into the appropriate container. In most of MN there are no rules since trash pickup is by commercial companies.
I just recently learned that you're not supposed to throw old or broken drinking glasses into the glass bins, because the composition of the glass is different than in drinking bottles or other glasses you put in there.
in noth-Baden there is a blue box for glas and stuff which you put out every three weeks or so. Also to Recycle batteries there is a thing at the entrance of the supermarket REWE where you can get rid of old, empty batteries. And if you have a lot of leaves and branches and stuff that is too big or too much to fit in the organic waste bin you bring that to the recycling hof too.
Here in Münster we have a sperrmüll day every month where everyone can put their furniture on the curb. Its a little bit messy the day before trash day but there are so many treasures to be found.
cool. I have been living in Berlin for over 20 years now,the trash in my house is 2 standard trash bins, 1 bio-trash bin that is for foodstuffs only, 2 paper bins thats are for CLEAN papers only, 2 bins for plastic and a "Special" bin for odd things like batteries,CDs.etc. Sperrmüll is not alowed at all. old furniture? bring it to a dump yourself! Oh I forgot the glass bins, one for clear glass and one for brown/green.
Our paper trash goes into a green bin. We have these bins since the middle of the 80s. But some cities around here got theirs way later and they were now blue. Maybe the color depends on when the system was introduced. It's the same as the yellow bins. It started with yellow bags "gelber Sack". Where I live, we still have the yellow bags, but we can order a proper yellow trashcan as well, but it was introduced years later.
I live in Duisburg and we do not have those big plastc things - so for big plastic packages we have to go to the reyeicling yard. But if you bring household trash (which you normally put in your trash container at home) to the yard you have to pay 2 Euros for a rubbish bag!
In Saxony Anhalt where I live there are electronic trash bins. You can throw into them everything that does not contain any batteries so either you have to remove them or you have to go to a special trash yard for those items.
Coming originally from the area of Elsdorf which is right next to Bergheim: As far as I remember Sperrmüll collection wasn't free. Instead you had to buy stickers which you put on each item. That's basically how you paid for their collection.
Hello I live in a small town at hte gates of Stuttgart that belongs to Kreis Ludwigsburg. Our trash is collected in "Rund" bin : means all tin metal and hard plastc trash, and "Flach" bin = Paper, Foils. All the trash is sorted by mashines with such a high efficency and ecanomical benefit, that even the trash from Italy (Rome Milano...) comes to Ludwitsburgs trashyards to get recycled. It's business its monopoly. And it was considered to mine old dump grounds to get all the recycling goods. The tried it our with an small old rubbish heap with al loss of 400 Million €. Win of Loss depends on ryciecling prices.
The only "rules" we have here in Virginia, USA (specific small county regulations) are that general trash (no food items - we have garbage disposers in the sink) and recyclables (glass, metal, plastic, etc.) are separated, Genera trash twice weekly, recyclables collected weekly. Electronics and TVs go to the local trash/recycling center, Big items like furniture are picked up if you call and make an appointment. - USA
Where I live (Rhein-Neckar-Region) we have a yellow bag instead of a bin, but in the next city over they decided to use yellow bins now, which caused quite the discussion... What can go in is printed on the outside of our yellow bags, it even has pictures, so it's really self-explanatory... Just went and got one, gotta be thorough xD You can throw in: - metals (Metalle): cans (Konserven), drink cans? (Getränkedosen - the're are some left without Pfand, e.g. the ones with Prosecco), caps (verschlüsse), aluminium bowls, caps and foils (Aluminium-Schalen, -Deckel und -Folie) - plastics (Kunststoffe) (yes this has subcategories, I'll use a "+" for those): + foils (Folien): carrying bags (Tragetaschen), bags (Beutel), plastic wrap/ wrapping film? (Einwickelfolie); + bottles (Flaschen): bottles of washing up-liquid/dishwashing detergent, laundry detergent and toiletries (I wanna mention, whether it's shampoo or dish soap bottles, they need to be cleaned out, just as the common yoghurt cup has to be) (Flaschen von Spül-, Wasch- und Körperpflegemitten) + cups (Becher): dairy products (Milchprodukte), margarine (Margarine), etc. - recyclable composites (Verbundstoffe): beverage and milk cartons (Getränke- und Milchkartons), vacuum packaging (Vakuum-Verpackungen) - foam plastic/ foam material? (Schaumstoffe): foamed plastic dishes for fruits and vegetables (Obst- und Gemüseschalen) (I feel a lot of those have been changed to cartons instead, at least where I buy apples and such) and other foamed packaging (andere geschäumte Verpackungen) I hope this helps you Dana in your quest to explain the conundrum that is the German trash. Btw, where my parents live (Rhein-Main-Gebiet), the compost bin isn't brown, it's green! But most places I know, use the brown bin for that. I live in a big city and since I live in the city centre we don't have compost bins, apparently because of too tight housing? I believe that was the explanation my landlady gave me when I asked her. Instead we have to throw all of our compostables in with the regular trash (Restmüll) and they pick that up on a weekly basis compared to yellow bags and paper bins, those get picked up every two weeks. I've never seen such big trash containers for aluminium or big plastics you have in Munich. They look the size of a glass bottle containers in the pics! Where I live the bulky waste (Sperrmüll) can be scheduled for a free pickup once a year, otherwise you can bring it to the Wertstoffhof (or maybe you have to pay if they have to come pick it up for you more than once). I believe where my parents live there are 4 days a year where they do pick ups for free, otherwise you have to bring it to the Wertstoffhof yourself. (I don't know, whether you can pay for having it picked up otherwise, since we never were in that situation).
I live in Übach-Palenberg, we have reg garbage, bio, gelb tonne (plastic) and papier tonne. We have trucks come around for metal, most of them come from Holland which is right next door, less than a mile away. We have recycling hofs for paint etc and I go on the internet and ask for a pickup of bulky items and it is for free, but if I am not mistaken you can only do this twice a year. Glass is all over at the school and at lots of grocery store getranke markts.
In Berlin it's even weirder. My house now has two glass bins, white and brown/green. Where I lived before, we didn't have that, there were those huge bins for the 3 colours. So different systems in the same city. In my yard we have a big black , blue and yellow bin and small brown + the two for glass.
As an American who also part German. This video makes me glad that I live in a American town. Where we have only 2 bins for our trash and recycling. In my house we have a red bin for our trash. And a blue bin for our recycling. How is anyone supposed to keep all these bin colors straight. I was already starting to get confused after a minute watching this video.
There are areas, where you buy the trash bags from the council, but you can only use it for that year. If you have leftover bags, you have to use the bag from the next year, to throw away the old ones. And yes, they are not cheap and no, you can't use other bags.
Really interesting to see the trash separation in different parts of the country and world! In Hamburg you have green bins instead of brown ones. In addition you can choose between yellow trash bags to put out on the street on collection days or and a yellow bin for the green point. Looking forward to the next video, have a nice weekend.
Good morning!😃 🌸☀️ GERMAN TRASH RULES...what are the trash rules where you live?!🗑 ♻️ Looking forward to learning about more trash differences around Germany and the whole world!😊
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paper bins are green around here. (Bavaria as well)
In my area, we only have a black bin for residual waste, the brown one for organic waste and a Blue one for Paper. If you would like to get rid of the other trash you'll have to bring it away by your self to Recicling place's that are opend to totaly strange Times... So as a Sigle who is a full time worker it's really annoying.(Heilbronn BW)
Paper-bins arround here are Black with a blue top.
At our "Wertstoffhof" it is possibil to bring larger ammounts off "green" like grass, or green cuttings also you can bring any kind of building construction waste and also your "Sperrmüll" but for some of the wastes you have to pay a fee. Besides if you bring creen cuttings or grass, you can get compost soil for free.
The green dot is a System that makes money. As long as you pay the license for using the green dot you can print it on your packaging. Even if the way to recycle it is not efficient and wastes more resources than it brings back. E.g. Try to separate the material form a milk box and you will understand.
Wanted Adventure In NRW (maybe not everywhere) we have for residual waste, garbage cans with red, purple, brown or white tops. Organic waste has everytime a green top, paper blue and plastic yellow. But I really don't know why we have so many colors for residual waste 🤷♂️
Für Batterien gibt es spezielle Behälter, meistens in Supermärkten. Die dürfen nicht in die Restmülltonne.
It's all very complicated! I'm afraid I've been harassed and persecuted by some people I stayed with in Germany. Their excuse for doing this was that I didn't know where to throw away any glass bottles. I decided to play it safe by putting the empty bottles in a cupboard where I saw they had put some empty glass bottles. I thought they would then take them somewhere when a certain amount had accumulated, but apparently this was wrong, and allegedly a big sleight against them. I was eventually sent out to get rid of them, but without enough instructions to find the bin. A neighbour told me "There isn't one here". I eventually dumped them into a small bin atttached to a post on a grass verge where no one was standing nearby watching at the time. I heard the bottles smashing as I dropped each one on top of the other! Of course, I throw away empty glass bottles where I live in London, but that's easy, because I don't have to seperate them from any other stuff. The morale of this story is that people must explain in detail to visitors exactly how and where to throw each type of waste, don't harass them for not knowing!
As someone from the US, I already feel overwhelmed about all the different bins in Germany lol (sidenote: it's also interesting how most of the world calls them "bins," but in the US we call them "cans"). In my county in California, we have 3 bins. A brown one for general garbage, a green one for yard waste (lawn clipings, tree/shrub clippings, etc), and a blue one for recycling. There is no bin for compost. Any food/etc would just get thrown in the brown can with general waste, or go down the garbage disposal (which I know Dana mentioned in another video that Germany doesn't have garbage disposals). Also, you are not required to use the blue recycling bin. While its use is highly encouraged, you will not be fined for putting recyclables in the brown waste bin. You can also opt to take your recyclables into the recycling center yourself. The recycling center will then sort the recycling for you, and actually PAY YOU for the items you bring in (the amount depends on the type of material and the weight). In my experience, I usually get back MORE than the $0.05 deposit that I paid for the containers. For large items (appliances, furniture pieces, etc), my county has free "curbside pickup" where you call the county and schedule an appointment to have the item picked up. On the scheduled day, you just leave the item on the curb and they will come haul it away for you, no charge. Toxic items or dangerous items (such as needles for injections, etc) are not picked up, and you must take them to a hazardous waste facility on your own. Most of these facilities do charge a fee since this kind of waste requires special care and attention.
Hazardous materials are collected without charge, at least in Cologne. One can take it to the waste facility themselves or look up the schedule for the mobile hazardous material collection. Many cities around Cologne have those trucks who show up at regular intervals.
In the US hospitals will take your old needle waste for free.
Wait, you didn't mention "gelber Sack", did you? That's where the plastic/Kunststoff stuff goes (in Niedersachsen). Do you put plastic wrappers and such in the general waste bin?
das ist das gleiche wie die gelbe Tonne, die erwähnt wurde. In meiner Region kommt auch alles in den Gelben Sack, in anderen eben in die gelbe Tonne :)
phénix I was wandering that too. Around Stuttgart where I'm from we have the "gelbe Sack" as well.
But around Karlsruhe which isn't that far away they have the "Wertstofftonne" and in there go all kinds of packaging (which includes paper as well as plastic if you don't have a "blaue Tonne").
Like in Kiel, they have special yellow bins instead of yellow sacks. However, you are encouraged to put your trash into bags anyway.
And as far as I remember the brown bin is green there ;)
Reiner Jung I'm from Kiel too and we don't have the yellow bins and are still using only the yellow bags :-)
I am from Ecuador and we don't recycle anything 😔 Last year, I went to visit my aunt that lives in Switzerland and I was amazed by their recycling system. I wish we had that here.
where I am from (Lower Saxony), its common that around Sperrmüll time, people from Poland drive around in white/yellow/blue vans and come to pick up some of your trash for their usage. That's why you need to be careful when you put anything on the sideways that's not trash, cause they might take it with them :D
Sperrmüll scavengers are common in Cologne too. Some are organized groups looking for metal or electronics or anything that can be fixed and resold later, either on the Internet or at flea markets, and there is of course those organized groups that take the collected stuff to their country, like Poland. And there are always individuals looking for stuff that people want to clean/fix and use themselves in their homes.
There is one problem though. Rules in Cologne are: any Sperrmüll that is on private ground is the owners property and taking it is theft and the trash collector won't take it either. It must be deposited in a neat pile on common property, usually the curb, in order to be collected. Any Sperrmüll that is put out on the curb to be collected by the trash collector is the trash collecting company's property and taking it away is theft. I have never heard of people getting fined or prosecuted for taking something of the trash pile, but it is clearly stated that it is theft and it is forbidden to take anything away.
Here in a small town near the border to the netherlands we had these people driving around too. And because it's a small, pretty conservative town people were complaining about them. So the city changed the system and now you have to order a truck picking up your stuff. And you need to list exactly what items you have. At least it's free for two times a year. Still it sucks
What! Ich vermisse Sperrmüll Zeiten in Hamburg.Ein Spass für mich als Kind,jetzt verboten(anmelden,was,Menge,nicht an der Strasse,Kosten für Abholung.Für alle Mieter machen)
bei uns haben sie jedenfalls immer polnische Kennzeichen.
Nieskatz' Die kamen sogar in mein Dorf an der Westküste in SH ^^
I live in an apartment complex in NW Indiana. We have trash dumpsters....and nothing else. Basically, anything and everything go into these dumpsters, unless you want to drive your recyclables to the recycling center at the government complex.
I do take my recyclables to the recycling center (which is just a row of green dumpsters), where they have what is known as 'single stream recycling'. That means everything goes into the dumpsters together - cardboard, newspapers, plastics, aluminum, glass, etc. Obviously, they have some way to separate it out later, but I don't know exactly how.
Our recycling center used to be in a different location, but because it wasn't visible from the road, people were dumping all kinds of large trash (mattresses, for example) into the bins. The city then moved the center to the government complex to allow the police and government employees to keep a better eye on it. Since they moved it, I have only ever seen actual recyclables in the dumpsters (yay!).
In HAMBURG we have green bins for organic waste (flowers, lawn clippings, food scraps, etc.); black bins with a blue top for carton and dry paper; yellow bins for small pieces of metal, combined plastic/metal pieces, plastic with the green dot. Some large housing complexes have their own glass containers, but for most of us they are situated at a random crossroad in the area (white, brown and green glass to be seperated, only to be used for disposal between 7am and 7 pm). Usually there is also a paper/carton container at that crossroad to be used by inhabitants of small houses/family homes who don't have the above-mentioned "black bin with a blue top". Some years ago they started introducing another container with a small opening for "small electronics" (= sandwich makers, hairdryers, etc.). "Unwieldy garbage" (the famous "Sperrmüll" = sofas, chairs, mattresses, etc., but also large electric appliances like microwave ovens, fridges, washing machines, dishwashers, tv sets, as well as dangerous stuff like batteries, chemicals, paint, etc. and large amounts of organic waste) have to be taken to the "Recyclinghof". One can also phone the waste disposal department to pick the "Sperrmüll" up, but they charge per cubic meter and the minimum you need (for them to come at all) is quite large, so one usually teams up with neighbours to share the cost. (It has to be taken into one basement though, for them to think it's from one person 😉). Last, but not least: we only pay for our black bins with a black top (for whatever does not fit into the above-mentioned categories/bins/containers or whatever one is unsure about), so recycling a lot of stuff actually saves money, because if everybody does it in a given building, that building needs small black bins only (which are much cheaper than the large ones). Unfortunately, however, the system is quite complicated and whenever one moves to another part of the country, one has to graduate in garbage disposal all over again ...
We in Austria (Vienna) use red for paper, blue for metal, yellow for plastic, brown for organic waste, white/green for white/colored glass and black for general waste. Except the general waste bins, all others are green and only the top cover is colored.
We also have free recycling yards (called Mistplatz) where you can bring nearly everything to. At some places you can even get some compost for free (half of a cubic meter if I'm right)
Hi Dana,
You missed to mention that old electronic devices, energy saving lamps (fluorescent tubes) and batteries have to be brought back to stores which sell them. They contain precious metals and harmful substances which need to be collected and recycled separately from the normal trash.
For old clothes it is recommended to put them into the 'Altkleidercontainer' or to shops like Oxfam which resell them for a good cause.
And there is definitely a misunderstanding in the plastic - you are supposed to dispose all plastic trash (plastic bags, wrapping foil etc. - no difference whether small or big in size) into the plastic containers. It is not supposed dispose plastic into the general household trash. But you can dispose the special organic trash bags into the organic trash bin.
In Kiel, we have yellow bin (for the green dot stuff), black bin with a green lid for biological waste, a blue paper bin and a black remaining trash bin. Also we are allowed to use paper bags or organic bag material for the biological waste. However, not allowed are plastic bags which are advertised as being bio degradable, but are actually made out of oil (allowed are bags conforming to EN 13432, if I am not mistaken).
I live in a 500-person village in Bavaria and we have another kind of trashcollecting: the "Altpapiersammlung". Members of our sports club rent a truck 3 times a year and drive around with it to collect paper waste (old newspapers, ...). AND they collect money for the club by doing this for each kg so there are only 1 or 2 blue bins in the whole village because everyone is collecting paper waste for the "Altpapiersammlung".
For Austria:
black: general waste
red: paper
blue: cans
brown: organic (no bags)
yellow: PET bottles (there is no Pfand)
white: clear glass
green: green glass
yellow bag (not in Vienna): plastics
some stores: batteries / CDs
Recyclinghof: everything else
we have blue for paper and big trash cans like those for glas
In Slovenia we have a green container for general trash, a container with yellow lids, where we put plastic and cans and the brown container where we put organic trash. Than we have Eco islands, where we put glass in red container, paper in blue and cans and plastic in yellow. Also somewhere we have special containers where we put items that you can not trow in general trash (electric appliances and similar stuff).
Recyclinghof is also nice if you have a garden. Fallen leaves, grass, or you perhaps removed a small tree - you can bring all that stuff to the Recyclinghof too.
I'm living in a county in western germany.. next to the dutch border. We don't have those huge bins for glass but every household owns 3 little green plastic boxes for glas. These are being picked up once a quarter.
+Karsten Henow Really interesting to know you also have household bins for glass! Thanks for the info😃
Wanted Adventure yeah.. it's definitely a regional thing. If I just go to Duisburg (40 km away) they already have those huge bins standing around on parking lots. I prefer those.. they don't block space in my garage. :)
You prefer the large bins until you have to dispose of glass in the late summer or early autumn. You throw in the first piece of glass and out comes an angry swarm of wasps chasing you to death because you interrupted their feeding frenzy.
Hmm.. that never happened to me. Ok.. the smell is disgusting in the summer time because a lot of people don't clean the glass before throwing it in. But that's something I can live with. :D
Only if you didn't rinse the glass first :-)
Hello Dana,
even if sperren means blocking, in this case i think the sperr in Sperrmüll comes from Sperrig (groß und unhandlich) (big and unwieldy/cumbersome/unmanageable)
And here in Kaiserslautern Sperrmüll and Elektrogeräte is free, you just have to call vor a date.
Have a nice time
I'm from switzerland, and here, you recycle sooooo much more 😅
The aludose from the redbull, or the lid of your yoghurt? Went into the alu-trash.
The carton of your milk or juce? Went intl the special-carton-trash.
Of course, we have the "usual" stuff like PET-trash, green-trash, glas-trash, electro-trash, normal-trash, carton-trash, paper-trash...
BlackFatalRose
Red Bull costs Pfand. The lid and package of the yoghurt have a green dot, so does the carton of milk or juice.
BassaSelim
Redbull doesn't cost pfand...
Maybe in germany, but here in switzerland, we don't have (or rarely have) pfand 😉
And there's no green dot on the yoghurt or milk or juce 🤔
BlackFatalRose
Sorry, yes. I was referring to Germany. Your examples for sooooo much more are recycled in Germany as well. ^^
I think what he wanted to say is that we recycle all the stuff you mentioned too. ^^
in germany we have automatic sorting facilities. no need to do further separation.
Recently, in my city in Alabama was added ;
cooking oil recycling .
There is a mesh cabinet with several five gallon jugs to pour in used cooking oil .
The used oil is made into Diesel fuel to be used in city trucks.
I was searching for that, what if I don't have this? what should I do in Berlin?
What came to my mind is, that if you have a pet like a dog, you have to collect the "shit". There are free "bags" for it everywhere. You can leave it in the bins in the area. If you get caught not to do it, you can get a panality.
We throw yellow plastic bags into the big yellow bin. In some areas of Germany (I think in smaller towns or villages like my hometown) you just have to put the bags on the side of the street and a garbage truck will collect them. But it happens just twice a month 😂
As I recall, the origin of the German "green dot" was a piece of legislation requiring manufacturers to take back plastic wrapping in order to reduce plastic waste and unnecessary packaging. Of course, neither manufacturers nor retailers wanted to have to deal with returned waste, so they formed a new company to collect this waste, requiring a fee to put a "green dot" on your packaging. And the plague of unnecessary plastic packaging is still raging unabated.
I live in Austin, Texas and recycling is very optional. Most of the apartment complexes have several big dumpsters for regular trash and only a few bins (like the kind of black bins you mentioned in your video) that are designated for recycling. Those recycling bins generally have a simple picture list of what can go into the bins. On the street corners downtown, there are public trash cans as well as an equal number of recycling cans, but on those recycling cans, there is no picture list of what is recyclable. I also work in the service industry, and it has been my experience that it depends on the restaurant whether or not you recycle. Currently, I work at an upscale restaurant and we recycle with blue bins (no picture list) and we put trash in the black bins. When I worked at a local restaurant, we did the same but we also composted all of the food and napkins in those special compostable bags you mentioned in the video. That restaurant had equal sized dumpsters for trash, recycling, and compost. However, when I worked at the airport, we only threw things in the trash can. I can't remember ever having seen a recycling can in the airport.
In hesse:
Altkleidersammlung - old clothing and rags,
Christmastrees get a separate Collection.
When in a Recyclingyard, you can seperate Sperrmüll into
Wood, Electronic and devices containing cooling liquid.
Tires and car-batteries can be sold back at any store, they have to take it back and give you a fixed price.
I think they are giving them to a special retailer and get even some more money out of this.
I am not sure what i got for my old car-battery, i think it had been 10€.
I'm from a small city near Naples.
They come every day to our houses and we must follow a calendar for each category. They take:
-Paper (printed paper, newspapers, tetrapak... NO oiled paper)
-Plastic and metal (only recyclable plastic, so for example PE, PET, PS... there's a list and metal of couse, typically food cans)
-Glass (every colour, NO ceramic)
-Food waste (it also include dirty paper like pizza boxes, tree leaves)
-Trash-trash (diapers, tampons, ... fun stuff)
But we also have a recycling yard (isola ecologica) where you can bring everything if you missed the day (except for food waste, but its pickup-frequency is high so it's not a big deal), you can call for big things and you can go there to deposit used oil (it's recycled as soap and biodisel) and get new bags if you need them.
. . . we come a long way :)
I have experience of both trash systems in the UK in cities and in a town in Poland near Warsaw.
In England, I've lived in 2 counties and it goes like this:
County 1: You have 4 bins, 1 for any glass, cans, paper & clothes or other similar materials - this is a small black box and, the products have to be clean and not packaged in plastic bags etc. There is also a black large bin which can collect just any house waste in black bin bags. There is another large recycling bin, the size of the waste bin, which again is loose without any bags, and you put clean cardboard and plastic products such as milk bottles, butter containers, meat packaging. Again, everything is meant to be clean. Finally there is a garden waste bin but here you have to pay for this additionally (£40 for the year), which is on top of the council tax which is already supposed to pay for your bin collection...
County 2: 3 bins, 1 quite small container for scraps of food, so vegetable peelings etc. This is easy to open and the local foxes are very happy, however not the residents. This gets collected weekly. Then there are 2 bins, one slightly smaller for your household waste & one slightly bigger for all recycling mentioned above, but this time it is together. This is collected on alternate weeks - this county is very harsh and if the bin lid is even slightly open (because the bin is very full), the bin men will not collect the rubbish.
In Poland in a flat:
There is a special outbuilding which is locked & you have a special key (to keep out the homeless), and in here you drop all of your household waste whenever it gets full at home, and this isn't really very carefully monitored, so if you're not one for recycling, nobody will know. In a block area of 7 buildings of roughly 30 flats each, this gets collected every morning. Outside of this outhouse there are also containers for recycling glass & plastic - there is 2 containers for green glass, and one for clear glass from what I remember.
Now I have written all this I realise how nobody will probably read this... But I cannot bring myself to delete it now :P Great video Dana, really interesting to learn about this difference!
Actually, your explanation of the yellow bin is not entirely correct. It used to be only for items with the "green dot" (Grüner Punkt) on them, but not anymore. Nowadays it's for plastic packaging waste in general (although only packaging, not other plastic things). And at least in some areas metal cans also go into the yellow bin/bag (some areas have Gelbe Tonne, others have Gelber Sack). The "green dot" is not official anymore and may or may not be present on the packaging.
Where I am, in the US, there are two kinds of cans ( rubber bins ) two Black for general trash and one blue for all recycling. In the Blue cans you can mix Metal, Glass, Paper, plastic but it should be clean. Yard waste can be put in brown paper bags and placed in the black cans. You don't have to use the recycling, but if you do use it, do not put dirty paper or plastic in the blue can (like pizza boxes). Scrap metal can be collected from next to the cans. Trash is collected weekly, recycling every two weeks.
i can't believe i just made it this early to this video lol
i had to laugh when my bff and her mom got in the car, pulled over on some strange side street, and took the recycling and started sorting everything into like 6 different dumpster type things.... like you said, right down to the color of glass. my mind was blown loooool
made me feel bad. like here we are in philly throwing out almost everything, yet in munich the citizens literally do the sorting of recyclables, themselves. so freaking cool.
#7monthsuntilMunichmovein #cantwaittobepartofyourworld #iwannabewheretherecyclersare
😂
+christina castaldi At the Munich airport there's only one bin for everything, but I noticed that on the side of the trash cans it says something like "don't worry about sorting your trash, we'll do it for you!" letting people know that they can just throw all their trash into that one bin without worry, it will get sorted out later😊
I'd been wondering what they did about "public" trash-- trash that is generated outside of the home. I bet tourists are confused!
calichef1962 lol that's why i'm so glad i stayed with my friend...... i probably would have sounded like an idiot trying to figure it out 😂😂
Wanted Adventure lol man i wish i saw that! being in munich airport by myself was quite.....intimidating so once i got to my gate, i just stayed there so i didn't get lost lololol
In Langen, Hessen (not to be confused with Langenhessen): Weissglas, Grünglas, Weissblechdosen. I don't remember what colors the bins are.
In the boonies of North Carolina where I live: There's a "convenience center" with two compactors (one is roped off at a time) for household trash, a skip for recyclage (usually closed since they put in a standalone compactor), another skip or two for furniture, and a standalone compactor for recyclage. All kinds of recyclable plastic are accepted, but not bags. I separate metal lids from glass jars.
Once I brought a dead compact fluorescent to the convenience center and asked the man what to do with it. He told me to just put it in household trash. I told him that one MUST NOT EVER put a fluorescent in the household trash, because it could break and release mercury. After some thought, I called the dentist, who has a device to capture mercury vapor from drilling fillings. So I brought the dead bulb to his office.
Hey.
I always watch your videos because it is fun to see how different west Germany is from bavaria. I was born and raised close to Düsseldorf so I only know that area. But since it would be boring to repeat your trash facts, I will tell you about my new home!
When I lived in Kyoto we had to separate burnable trash, not burnable trash, plastic bottles, cans, glass, paper and compostable trash. There were special trash bags which you had to buy at your local supermarket or convenience store, don't you dare using any other bags! Oh, and don't forget to rip off the label of your bottles and take off the lid.
Paper was stacked and taken to it's designated place. We were handed a schedule for the pickup days of each trash and had to put the bags in the trash area in front of the house late at night or early in the morning. Of course you must not take out burnables when it was compostable day!
As for "Sperrmüll", you have to call them to your house and get it picked up.
Here in Tokyo no one seems to care. Maybe it's just this ward, though. I don't know. The only thing that's interesting here is, that there is a trash room in this building where you put everything. There are boxes for bottles and cans and a place to put you paper but you don't have to bother and separate it.
Next week we're moving to the neighboring city. I hope the trash rules are easy to understand!
As for a general trash fact for japan: always carry a plastic bag with you as it is really hard to find trash bins in public areas! Even parks don't really have any. Your are supposed to take your trash home.
Compostable bioplastic organic waste bags are allowed in the Biomüll, but only if they are more than 50% biobased and certified according to EN 13432. But even if they are, each county can still decide individually if they allow these bags. That's why nobody uses them. The Recycling Lobby doesn't want a lot of bioplastics in the waste stream, because their systems are not designed for these new kind of plastics. The compost facilities also fear more regular plastic in the Biomüll if they allow bioplastics.
Here in Austria the colours are these way: black is for general waste, red is for paper, blue is for metal, brown for organic waste, yellow for plastic, white for transparent glass and green for coloured glass. In Austria as well you have to pay attention to the time: you can trash your glass generally between 6 and 22. Regarding big waste (such as forniture for instance) or electronic waste there is surely a hotline that you can call, but I've never used it so I don't know how it exactly works
Where I live (the Netherlands) we used to have a bin for general waste (black), organic trash (brown or green) and paper (blue). Plastic and glass had to go in a large bin in the neighbourhood. However, rules recently changed and now the black bin is for recyclables (cans, all plastic, juice/milk cartons) and we have to bring our general waste to the large bin. This really stimulates recycling as no one likes walking in the street with a sack of trash.
You're lucky with different trash rules from state to state. Here it's regulated differently in every town.
In the cities where i lived in North Rhine Westphalia you always can throw big plastic and aluminium bins in the yellow trash bin or yellow sack.
And i never heard, that Sperrmüll cost you anything!
And from my hometown Bochum i know that only normal trash and construction waste will cost you money to dispose of.
Brussels here. Similar as in Germany, with a blue bags for recyclables (but only plastic bottles, cans and drink cartons), a yellow plastic bag (yes...) for clean paper and cardboard), a white bag for the rest, and optionally, an orange bag for organic trash and a green bag for garden waste, such as mowed grass. We have glass containers, and more and more often, they are underground, to avoid the noise problem you mentioned. In theory, you can't throw any glass at night, but anarchists as we are, we mostly don't care.
hey guys .... here in NRW-Wuppertal area we have yellow bins if u have ur own house and yellow bags if u live in a flat that u get for free from the Hof but only 1roll a 12 bags per person a year, we dont have these big taxi colored containers here and our paper bin is green not blue. We also have the Sperrmull thats for free u can choose an apointment and some towns give u one. And the best bit ..... while living in Rheinland-Pfalz once in a while a dustbin suit man would come 30 min before the truck came and check EVERY bin ... he could empty it on ur garden and check all things in it and if he would find ONE thing that didnt bellong in there he would put a BIG FAT RED STICKER on the front of ur bin so allllll the neighbours could see ur a looser in recycling!!!!
Where I am in Australia, we have three dark green bins. One has a red top which is for general waste, one has a yellow top which is for recycling (all recycling goes in here. Cans, glass etc) then we have a light green topped bin for natural waste, e.g grass clippings, foliage etc. We can also dump things at what we call "the tip" which is a junkyard, in all different sections from general waste right through to scrap metal and white goods. 😊
Here, next to Bergheim, you can really order a truck from the trash office for free, but you have limited space that they take with them. And at the city has a"trash collector" place but you have to pay for the most (not for electronic)
i believe trash sorting has been removed around bucharest. o.o at least in my area. there used to be 3 colored bins: yellow for paper, green for plastic, blue for glass? or something of the sorts. but the pictures on them and the openings made it quite clear which one was for which. it seems romania doesn't like sorting out the trash anymore. so everything goes out as general waste :(
We have different Recycling Systems here each County/ City (Ba-Wü). Most common is Gelber Sack, yellow bag. Which is same as you are using yellow bin, but no fill Limits. A bin is full when it is full. Gelber Sack, in this case plural, gelbe Säcke, you can leave as many you want. There is a schedule, they pick up gelber Sack in period of every 2 weeks (here Mondays). The Restmüll and all others you've mentioned is same. Sperrmüll is once in Spring a big Collection, and also scheduled. And you have an Option, for free, to call them twice a year to pick your Sperrüll and getting an Appointment then when they will come. In fact that gelber Sack has no amount Limits, i think it is regulated by the Basic fee. Could be generally higher than yours, i guess.
I'm from Bamberg, Upper Franconia, and here it's Restmüll/black, Paper/green, Organic/brown. (I'm living on the countryside, and my friends in the city have blue paper bins!)
We do not have the yellow plastic bin, but we have the "gelber Sack"/yellow bag.
Also, Sperrmüll comes from "sperrig"/bulky, not from "sperren"/block ;) It's just a tiny difference,but I thought I could point it out.
Our Recyclinghof has a metal container, too, no matter how big the item.
And many may find German rules rather crazy, but the thing is that our country is really densely populated and those ridiculous seeming rules are necessary to make living together as pleasant as possible (also it's better for the environment) :D
We live near Hannover in Lower Saxony. General Trash is the same here. Organic waste is a green bin here but personal we don't have one because we have a "Kompost" in our garden, meaning we recicle it ourself. Plastic is collected in "Gelbe Säcke" (yellow bags). Wish we had bins for that too, because the bags are really thin and they tear quite often. For paper it's the same here: blue bin. But when I was a kid, we hadn't had that. Paper was collected in a central container like the glas. For Sperrmüll we have like two free tickets per year here. With these tickets you can either bring it to the Recyclinghof or you can let someone pick it up at your home. Both is for free. If you don't have a free ticket anymore you have to pay it. All other trashs like metal or electric stuff you have to bring to the Recyclinghof as well. But we have these "Schrotthändler" who drive around to pick up bigger metalic trash too 😅
I live in the mountains of Virginia, and we must bring our trash to a trash collection place that is open everyday until 5:00 PM, except Sundays. I used to live in Northern Virginia, right outside of D.C. and we had a trash pick up every Wednesday. We had one bin for recycling and one bin for trash. We also had a list of what we could and couldn’t recycle.
Where I grew up, the trash rules were similar to what you explained. I recently moved to another area in Germany and well, things are very different here. We also have the Restmüll and organic trash. But then we divide it in "rund" and "flach". Rund is everything like glass, juice-packages, Joghurt-Packages and stuff like this. Flach is paper and plastic foil.
In Potsdam, the main city of the state of Brandenburg, "Sperrmüll" is free for two times a year. You have to call the trash office and they give you an appointment later. Interesting fact: From the moment on you put your "Sperrmüll" on the street, it is no longer your property, cause it belongs now to the town. Nevertheless you often see people looking through the "Sperrmüll" of others to see, if there is something, they can still use. The same the other way round: Some people notice, there is "Sperrmüll" and they add their own stuff to it. The problem is, you've called the trash office and said, how much you'll be putting on the street. So when others take or add something, the amount of your "Sperrmüll" no longer matches the amount you announced. In serious cases of deviation the trash office may charge you additional fees.
In my region of Belgium ( Mechelen ) we have 4 collections of garbage : 1) "restafval" (Restmüll) every 2 weeks in black containers, costs about 63€ a year 2) PMD which stands for "Plastic, Metaal & Drankartons" in transparant blue bags and may only contain plastic bottles like for water, lemonade, shampoo + metal cans from beer, sofdrinks, conserved products + paper containers for milk, soup, juice. This collected at the same time as general garbage but free of charge. 3) Paper, put in a carton box (one can use whatever box you have) : this is collected every 4 weeks, also free. 4) "General plastic" put in transparant pink bags may only contain buttertrays, yoghurt pots, plastic wrappers, plastic bags, etc. This collected every 8 weeks and also free.
All the rest of garbage like wood, grass, used electronics, paint, motor oil, glass, building debris, metals ... we have to bring ourselves to the "container park" which exists in every town. Once inside you have to deposit every kind of garbage in their specific container, so you better sort things out before you go.
Very good video. Here in the New Orleans area, we haven't got as organized a system and things just get pitched out, which is a shame. Here in a suburb and not the same county as New Orleans, we have two bins: One large black bin for garbage (all garbage) and a small recycle bin (mostly for plastics, newspapers, etc.). Twice a week a recycle truck comes around and tosses everything into the back of a trash truck. There's no sorting by the recycling collectors, so it is one big pile of everything in the trucks. What they do after this is beyond me. Later on the same days, the regular trash truck comes through and takes all remaining bagged garbage from the black bin and crushes the materials. Big items, such as broken furniture, etc., may stay on the sidewalk for a week, until another truck takes those items away. The system directly in New Orleans is almost identical. It is a sad system but the one the exists.
in my city there are 4 bins: paper trash, plastic trash, biologic trash and everything else. for the biologic ones, you are allowed to place that extra made biologic bags inside. why shouldnt u be allowed to do that? and in our plastic bin you can put every kind of plastic, even cans. so you dont have to look at the green point. our recyclinghof is also for free.
i think the appearence of these big plastic bins located next to the glass ones depends on what kind of bins you have next to the houses. at our flat at first we didnt have a plastic bin. so there was one located next to the glass.
then they added this and the big one was gone.
Here in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) we have 3 bins, blue for certain plastics (same as in the USA you have to check the list of what kind of plastic can go there), aluminum, and non refundable glass, green for food left overs or items that can be used as compost (they can go in the bags that are designed to bio-degrade) and the black bins for the rest. Dangerous garbage, old batteries you can take them to the city yard and is free of charge, old mattresses, lumber wood, old appliances and other garbage can be taken to the yard where your car is weighted before and after going to the yard and you are charged by weight (minimum charge is $5.00), or you can call the city to get a tag in order for them to collect it or on certain dates (after holidays) where there is no limit on the amount of garbage that can be put out. The pickup schedule is bi-weekly for the blue and black bins and weekly for the green.
In the southwest of Germany we actually have 2 green bins in houses in downtown of bigger cities. One for paper and one for glas.
But we don't have the yellow bins for plastic. Instead, we get free big yellow plastic bags at some official places to put the plastic trash in. We have to put those bags on the street every 2 weeks, where the city picks them up.
We get 2 large bins, one for all recycling and the other for everything else. It's weird to put my paper in with all the glass, plastic and aluminium, but apparently it works. Great video!
There are also places where to dispose of old batteries, little green boxes on most supermarkets
Where i live, there is a black (or dark grey) bin for general waste, blue for (dry and clean) paper and the "gelbe Sack" for waste with the "Grüner Punkt" on it. And there are glas containers and recycling yards, too. we can bring our metal trash to the resycling yard, so there is no collecting truck or something. And we can order two (or so) free collections of "Sperrmüll" per year. LG, Freaky
I live in Roanoke, Virginia and we have one pale blue bin the same size as the trash bin, everything, all glass, all plastics, all paper, everything (that has the appropriate recycling symbol) goes in (no bulk items) and is picked up twice monthly. We are allowed 10 trips per year per household to the bulk waste center at no cost. The waste management center separates everything for us, couldn't be simpler.
In my suburb in Australia, there are three bins, green lid for garden waste (no food scraps), yellow lid for all recyclables (including plastics, depending on what number is on them) and red lid (all black for old bins) for general waste. Sperrmüll is called hard rubbish. In some places it happens a few times per year. In others you have to book it and it's free up to a few times a year. Details vary by local government.
In Dortmund I haven't seen any of these general plastic or aluminium containers so far except at the recycling yard.
Sperrmüll here is charged with 20€. The amount of Sperrmüll is also limited by what could fit into one single room and only household inventory is allowed. So if you want to recycle 20 Europaletten they'll tell you that you've to go to a recycling yard. Normally they're really nice and take more as they have to, but it can happen, that they won't take everything although it was on the list or try to double charge you afterwards because it was so much. Another problem in some areas here is, when you order the Sperrmüll, some people take this as an invitation the get rid of their Sperrmüll for free and later you're the one that still has trash on his yard because they took only what was on the list.
Some types of waste at the recycling yard here can be thrown away for free. For others like Bauschutt (building rubble?) you'll have to pay.
The rest of the waste management seems pretty identical, but you didn't mention the Altkleider Container. They are normally maintained by the church. There're big beige containers, that are run by the Caritas (catholic church) and recently new metal containers that are located together with the glass containers that are run by the Diakonie (protestant church)
Some counties are also collecting X-mas trees in the first two weeks of January.
I´m from Germany and live in a little village, where is a Place for example the glass, bigger plastic, Sperrmüll, usw., but its just opened on wednesday and saturday. The "normal" trash will be fetched on thursday and friday. Sorry for my bad english XD.
where i live in central north carolina we've got two bins. the green bin is for trash and the brown bin is for recycling. we've always thought the colors ought to be the other way around but it is what it is lol. trash gets picked up every week and recycling is every other week. there's also places you can drive to that are dumps specifically for things like electronics or for big waste like large pieces of equipment, broken furniture, tree branches, things like that. also in the fall the town does leaf pickup when they come for the trash where you can leave your bagged leaves out by the road next to your cans and they'll take them away.
Where I grew up, the bins for organic waste used to be green (now they only have a green lid and black bottom). Also, since we had a paper factory nearby, be had to collect old paper in large cardbord boxes which then got collected by sport clubs or other local social clubs. In other towns, paper had to be brought to big paper containers similiar to glass.
I'm from Ruhrgebiet and I can tell, we don't have the plasticbins, BUT you can put all the plastic here on the yellowbin, not only the stuff with the green dot. Litteraly everything made from plastic.
One big difference between Germany and The San Francisco Bay Area is that dirty / wet paper, such as greasy pizza boxes can go in the compost bin. We have large combined mixed glass, paper and plastics bins and a compost bin. along with a tiny trash bin. You put used batteries in a bag on top of the recycling bin. Toxic items can be labeled and put out separately on trash day. Right now I'm visiting Phoenix where they STILL haven't banned plastic shopping bags! I had to recycle a couple ancient tube TV's here. Best Buy has a free e-waste program but I would have to PAY $25.00 per TV! Lucky after driving 15 miles to the city recycling program I had to pay $5.00 per set. Back home in San Francisco if you didn't bring your bags you have to pay $0.25 per paper bag. Or take all your groceries lose in the cart to your car. You also avoid the withering looks from your cashier and fellow shoppers.
In Belgium, the time of "spermüll" has sadly gone, now you be to bring everything to the recycling center yourself, and even pay for the stuff they don't make profit from (sometimes after a certain treshold). F.e. getting rid of a mattress costs about €1 per 12kg, but you're allowed to bring 2000 kg in organic waste to the recycling center per year, anything more gets charged too. Bringing metal is still free (otherwise it would be silly as we also have scrapyards paying to get your metal).
The glass container situation is pretty much like in Germany, and we also have a lot of refund bottles.
As for the trash that's picked up at our front door: there's the paper and cardboard collection, the PMD bag and the rest waste. Here PMD stands for PET plastics, metal containers (like cans) and "drinkkartons" aka brick packs. They're also experimenting with allowing more plastic types in the PMD bag, but the sorting centers need to be able to handle this.
In Berlin, we have these yellow bins as well, even from the same recycling company (ALBA), but we are allowed to put any old packaging waste into them without having to look at whether it has a green dot or not. Anything that's recyclable, including, but not limited to, plastic and aluminium, can be put in there. I think even smaller electronic devices go in there, as long as they don't have batteries inside them (anything up to the size of a toaster or a hair dryer maybe). On the other hand, we don't have free Sperrmüll pickup, which accounts for the fact that people just put out their old furniture or household appliances out on the street, which is quite the nasty thing. So politicians are talking about reintroducing free Sperrmüll pickups once a year or so. We do have those free recycling yards here, too, but many people don't have a car or sometimes not even a drivers license, so they have no means of transporting their trash to the recycling yard.
I have my special experience with recycling yards in munich. When bringing some old furniture to a recycling yard in munich, they refused to take it. It was a recycling yard operated by the city of munich, but because of where I live I may only use the recycling yards of the district of munich. I understood that they can't offer a free service for someone not from their area because it is funded by local tax, but it wasn't even possible to pay for it and leave it there.
i love how you are talking about stuff that seems totally normal, like so normal i dont even think about it. and you are making a whole video out of it. bringing your trash to the recycling Hof
There are yellow bins in Hamburg, where I live, and we call them Verpackungsmüll (Packaging bins/Packaging trash). And the organic bin is green over here which makes a *lot* more sense!
J. H. Warum macht denn bitte grün mehr Sinn? Ich meine Organuschen heißt ja nicht immer Grünzeug. Und das meiste, das man da rein tut ist ja alt also braun und matschig.
In New Orleans the large black bins are marked for Trash and smaller bins also black are marked Recyclables. They tell you which is which. You do have to call the city to schedule a pickup for mattresses, electronic items and such that don't fit in the bin and for rubble and debris. It's free for the collection though if you put it out more than 24 hours ahead of time you can be fined. Also they prefer trash to be in bags before being binned. It's a lil' complicated to explain.☺️
Austria:
Black bin: General waste (like PE plastic packaging, meat or bones, dirty/wet/fatty paper, hygiene products)
Black/Green bin with yellow top: PET plasic bottles (only PET)
Green with red top: Clean paper, cardboard
Brown: Organic waste (except meat, oil/large amounts of fat, hot ash)
Not everywhere:
Metal containers with one green and one white flap: Glass (clear/coloured)
One for all sorts of metal cans (I can't recall how it looks like)
Batteries, electronics and oil are special waste, most supermarkets will pick up the former, your city the latter two
I work for a trash / recycling company in germany. Even the People living here get confused of how to proper recycle. And almost no one is aware that there is bureaucracy behind it. People get very angry when we dont empty their bins after they didnt sort their stuff properly... But I cant help it. You are not recycling for me, you are doing it for the environment. (I just noticed my bad english here.... sorry!)
Recyclables are supposed to be separated from the trash where I'm from, but I think it's collected all together grr -_- but the aluminium soda cans are kept separate and we personally take them to the recycling plant and can be paid for them, so we collect them up for a long time and then bring lots of bags to the plant and they weigh it and we get a few bucks for extra spending money
In our town the bin for paper is green not blue and the sperrmüll is free two times a year
In Washington state we have 3 bins, Trash, recycling, and compost/yard waste. They are black, blue and green respectively. Plastic, metal, glass and clean paper go in recycling. Food waste, yard waste and food soiled papers go in compost. And everything else goes in trash. Sounds a lot more complicated in Germany
In Ireland it depends which trash company you are with some have glass bins (normaly red), most company's have brown compost bin (some take cooked food some don't) , blue recycling bins (some take more materials than other .. examples some take food tins and some don't ) and plain black or black with a green lid for general waste.
In towns you can find the glass bins same as yours and sometimes tin/can bins . My family gave up using trash company's about 8years or so ago. They go to the recycling centre(like your yard) it cost €3 for a car entry, we have so many bins there are 5 plastic bins ( hard plastic, pet 1 , 2 , mixed other plastic , soft plastic) there is a bin for bottle tops, a food tin bin, cans bin, metal bin, cardboard, paper, different glass bins, batterie bin, small electric wire bin, wood bin, polystyrene bin, paint bin, electric appliance(costs extra depending on size) , matress(€20 each ) you can also bring general waste and they weight it and charge you. I believe there are more little charges for other things there but I don't know all of them
No plastic or aluminum bins on the streets where I live (north of Stuttgart). You are allowed to throw aluminum _cans_ into the glass bin. The rest, along with all the plastic, you have to take to the Recyclinghof (every municipality has at least one of these). They also take old batteries and electronics waste there, but for your bulky waste, you have to go another place, the Kreismülldeponie (of which there are two in the county). Or you can have it picked up a few times a year.
My county in Baden-Württemberg just recently introduced organic bins, but they have trouble catching on and oftentimes they will attract crows. I have no idea why this doesn't seem to be an issue in other counties, but it is here. So the government has made them optional - which means no one really uses them. At least no one I know.
Robin of Hood First of all, I don't live in Stuttgart, I live BY Stuttgart... In a totally different county (Kreis). Secondly, I said "crows" not "cows".
I live 50 kilometers from Cologne. Here we have not the yellow bin, but the yellow sack. We have to apply for Sperrmüll and we will get an appointment when the stuff will be picked up. The whole cost then between 15 € and 18 €. The other garbage regulations are just like in Munich. I think we in Germany have rules for almost everything.
Possibly interesting fact about the history of the yellow bin/bag: back in the 90s the government wanted to reduce trash from packaging. So they mandated that any packaging can be returned to the shop where you bought the item. As an alternative, the producers of packaging invented the Grüner Punkt (green recycling symbol) where the cost for recycling a package is included in the licensing fee for the Grüner Punkt symbol which is lower for more recycling friendly packaging. So consumers can return any package with that symbol in the yellow bin/bag without paying for the bin. But if your yellow bin is full and you still have room in your regular bin (for which you do pay), you can put these items in there as well. In most areas, yellow and black bins are treated the same (i.e. remove any metal then burn the rest), the difference is just who pays for the bin.
Where I live in the uk we have a brown bin for the general waste and a green bin for all the recycling as in paper, plastic, aluminium, glass etc all in one bin
Yeah but i think its better if trash get seperated at consumer level
I recently bought bread in a paper bag with a transparent window in it - which had the instruction to give it to the waste paper. Instinctively I would rather put it into packaging because there's plastic, but apparently there are types of plastic that can go into paper recycling.
The problem with having to bring oversized rubbish to the recyclinghof is - what do you do when you don't have a car? It's easy for the city, they don't need to send a truck around with strong men to lift that bulky furniture in, but then it can be a logistic problem to move these things around, and renting a van for it is costly.
Now that I am in rural MN, there is only one recycling container and one trash/garbage container. When I lived in Clifton, NJ, which was for most of my life, there was no recycling pickup but there was a town recycling center and we dumped everything into the appropriate container. In most of MN there are no rules since trash pickup is by commercial companies.
I just recently learned that you're not supposed to throw old or broken drinking glasses into the glass bins, because the composition of the glass is different than in drinking bottles or other glasses you put in there.
in noth-Baden there is a blue box for glas and stuff which you put out every three weeks or so. Also to Recycle batteries there is a thing at the entrance of the supermarket REWE where you can get rid of old, empty batteries. And if you have a lot of leaves and branches and stuff that is too big or too much to fit in the organic waste bin you bring that to the recycling hof too.
Here in Münster we have a sperrmüll day every month where everyone can put their furniture on the curb. Its a little bit messy the day before trash day but there are so many treasures to be found.
cool. I have been living in Berlin for over 20 years now,the trash in my house is 2 standard trash bins, 1 bio-trash bin that is for foodstuffs only, 2 paper bins thats are for CLEAN papers only, 2 bins for plastic and a "Special" bin for odd things like batteries,CDs.etc. Sperrmüll is not alowed at all. old furniture? bring it to a dump yourself! Oh I forgot the glass bins, one for clear glass and one for brown/green.
Our paper trash goes into a green bin. We have these bins since the middle of the 80s. But some cities around here got theirs way later and they were now blue. Maybe the color depends on when the system was introduced. It's the same as the yellow bins. It started with yellow bags "gelber Sack". Where I live, we still have the yellow bags, but we can order a proper yellow trashcan as well, but it was introduced years later.
I live in Duisburg and we do not have those big plastc things - so for big plastic packages we have to go to the reyeicling yard. But if you bring household trash (which you normally put in your trash container at home) to the yard you have to pay 2 Euros for a rubbish bag!
In Saxony Anhalt where I live there are electronic trash bins. You can throw into them everything that does not contain any batteries so either you have to remove them or you have to go to a special trash yard for those items.
Also, Sperrmüll doesn't so much come from the verb "sperren", but more from the adjective "sperrig", which means bulky.
Coming originally from the area of Elsdorf which is right next to Bergheim: As far as I remember Sperrmüll collection wasn't free. Instead you had to buy stickers which you put on each item. That's basically how you paid for their collection.
Hello
I live in a small town at hte gates of Stuttgart that belongs to Kreis Ludwigsburg. Our trash is collected in "Rund" bin : means all tin metal and hard plastc trash, and "Flach" bin = Paper, Foils.
All the trash is sorted by mashines with such a high efficency and ecanomical benefit, that even the trash from Italy (Rome Milano...) comes to Ludwitsburgs trashyards to get recycled. It's business its monopoly. And it was considered to mine old dump grounds to get all the recycling goods. The tried it our with an small old rubbish heap with al loss of 400 Million €. Win of Loss depends on ryciecling prices.
The only "rules" we have here in Virginia, USA (specific small county regulations) are that general trash (no food items - we have garbage disposers in the sink) and recyclables (glass, metal, plastic, etc.) are separated, Genera trash twice weekly, recyclables collected weekly. Electronics and TVs go to the local trash/recycling center, Big items like furniture are picked up if you call and make an appointment. - USA
Where I live (Rhein-Neckar-Region) we have a yellow bag instead of a bin, but in the next city over they decided to use yellow bins now, which caused quite the discussion...
What can go in is printed on the outside of our yellow bags, it even has pictures, so it's really self-explanatory...
Just went and got one, gotta be thorough xD
You can throw in:
- metals (Metalle): cans (Konserven), drink cans? (Getränkedosen - the're are some left without Pfand, e.g. the ones with Prosecco), caps (verschlüsse), aluminium bowls, caps and foils (Aluminium-Schalen, -Deckel und -Folie)
- plastics (Kunststoffe) (yes this has subcategories, I'll use a "+" for those):
+ foils (Folien): carrying bags (Tragetaschen), bags (Beutel), plastic wrap/ wrapping film? (Einwickelfolie);
+ bottles (Flaschen): bottles of washing up-liquid/dishwashing detergent, laundry detergent and toiletries (I wanna mention, whether it's shampoo or dish soap bottles, they need to be cleaned out, just as the common yoghurt cup has to be) (Flaschen von Spül-, Wasch- und Körperpflegemitten)
+ cups (Becher): dairy products (Milchprodukte), margarine (Margarine), etc.
- recyclable composites (Verbundstoffe): beverage and milk cartons (Getränke- und Milchkartons), vacuum packaging (Vakuum-Verpackungen)
- foam plastic/ foam material? (Schaumstoffe): foamed plastic dishes for fruits and vegetables (Obst- und Gemüseschalen) (I feel a lot of those have been changed to cartons instead, at least where I buy apples and such) and other foamed packaging (andere geschäumte Verpackungen)
I hope this helps you Dana in your quest to explain the conundrum that is the German trash.
Btw, where my parents live (Rhein-Main-Gebiet), the compost bin isn't brown, it's green! But most places I know, use the brown bin for that.
I live in a big city and since I live in the city centre we don't have compost bins, apparently because of too tight housing? I believe that was the explanation my landlady gave me when I asked her. Instead we have to throw all of our compostables in with the regular trash (Restmüll) and they pick that up on a weekly basis compared to yellow bags and paper bins, those get picked up every two weeks.
I've never seen such big trash containers for aluminium or big plastics you have in Munich. They look the size of a glass bottle containers in the pics!
Where I live the bulky waste (Sperrmüll) can be scheduled for a free pickup once a year, otherwise you can bring it to the Wertstoffhof (or maybe you have to pay if they have to come pick it up for you more than once).
I believe where my parents live there are 4 days a year where they do pick ups for free, otherwise you have to bring it to the Wertstoffhof yourself. (I don't know, whether you can pay for having it picked up otherwise, since we never were in that situation).
I live in Übach-Palenberg, we have reg garbage, bio, gelb tonne (plastic) and papier tonne. We have trucks come around for metal, most of them come from Holland which is right next door, less than a mile away. We have recycling hofs for paint etc and I go on the internet and ask for a pickup of bulky items and it is for free, but if I am not mistaken you can only do this twice a year. Glass is all over at the school and at lots of grocery store getranke markts.
In Berlin it's even weirder. My house now has two glass bins, white and brown/green. Where I lived before, we didn't have that, there were those huge bins for the 3 colours. So different systems in the same city. In my yard we have a big black , blue and yellow bin and small brown + the two for glass.
As an American who also part German. This video makes me glad that I live in a American town. Where we have only 2 bins for our trash and recycling. In my house we have a red bin for our trash. And a blue bin for our recycling. How is anyone supposed to keep all these bin colors straight. I was already starting to get confused after a minute watching this video.
There are areas, where you buy the trash bags from the council, but you can only use it for that year. If you have leftover bags, you have to use the bag from the next year, to throw away the old ones. And yes, they are not cheap and no, you can't use other bags.
Really interesting to see the trash separation in different parts of the country and world! In Hamburg you have green bins instead of brown ones. In addition you can choose between yellow trash bags to put out on the street on collection days or and a yellow bin for the green point.
Looking forward to the next video, have a nice weekend.