See title. I realized that trash collection systems sometimes differ between streets… so this is just about where you live, whether it is one specific street/building or an entire country. No need to mention exactly where if you don’t feel comfortable.
For where I currently live. Government makes colored trash bags (plastics/metals, papers, organic, general waste, etc) that people can buy at local supermarkets, and these bags are required for trash collection. On collection day we just… place the bags outside of the houses/apartments. Some places buy their own trash bins too, but they are rare.
The place I live in seem to take recycling very seriously. I’ve heard from colleagues that putting the wrong things in a bag sometimes result in the “trash police” sending a fine to where you live. Allegedly the police do that by looking at where your last letter/Amazon/random delivery address (in your paper recycling bag) was sent to…
My understanding is that it is a surprisingly effective recycling system… but with the downside that 1) the city doesn’t look particularly great on/after trash collection day, and 2) sometimes the local wildlife will rip open the trash bags
Edit: some more details regarding where I live if anyone is interested. Most people only use four colored bags that are collected per week: blue (plastic, metal, something else…), yellow (paper-based recyclables), white (“residual”, essentially non-recyclable items), and orange (kitchen waste). There are also bags for garden waste and heavy waste, but they are not picked up from residential addresses. Glass is either returned to the supermarket (beer bottles) or disposed of at specific dropoff bins. Things like batteries/electronics are specific, I just take them back to the store. There are also pink bags, but they are only used by businesses
Germany here. There are some smaller differences by state.
Some states collect biological waste separately, while others collect it as general house trash.
Packaging trash is paid for by the producers beforehand, then people collect the packaging (most often plastics, making many people think we’re collecting plastics in it), depending on state, either in yellow bags or yellow trash bins. Every two weeks, people put their bags next to the street, and a collection truck goes through and collects them. The person responsible for it is often based on house rules (contracted out, or a rotating inhabitant flat list). Plastics get recycled, to some degree. Some of it goes into burning, so the burning processing plant has enough burnable material.
Paper is collected separately from house trash, too, and collected at intervals. Multi-tenant housing often has shared bins, because there’s no or little cost associated to the bins.
“House trash” is collected in bins. Every two weeks collected (placed next to the street, same stuff as above). Some multi-tenant housing can have per-flat bins. Depending on their size, they cost a different fixed monthly fee. Where I live there’s 24 individual bins, every one in its own labeled compartment, some with a lock. Every two weeks, everyone moves their own bin next to the street and then back the next day (or later, depending on diligence and being away). For most of Germany, the trash gets burned.
Every seller of batteries has to accept/collect used batteries. Typically, supermarkets have small boxes at the entrance or exit.
Twice a year you can put bigger stuff like furniture next to the street. Some people will go through the streets and look or take what they can use. A truck collects them as trash.
Following some plan or schedule, but not particularly regularly, there’s a moving collection point for small special waste. Like eletronics, fat, chemicals, etc. For the regular people. This is especially for people who can’t drive the stuff off by themselves.
You collect electronic waste and drive to a communal collection point, for free. Communal or region collection points have various types of waste they collect for free, and also some types of trash and bigger or commercial trash dumping costs money (like construction and demolition waste, soil, special kinds of waste).
Bottles and drinking cans are either single-use or multi-use. You pay a deposit and when you bring them back you get it back. All single use bottles and cans use a common system, with an image code printed on it, and every seller of them has to collect them no matter where they come from specifically. So as a consumer you can bring them to any supermarket. As a supermarket, you participate in a centralized system that shifts and receives and pays the deposit/payout money as necessary.
Human waste gets flushed away, moves through the sewers, and gets collected and processed in sewage plants.
For restaurants with fat waste, for example, there are businesses that handle the collection and adequate waste handling.
Simple glass, like glass bottles, not like windows, you collect and then bring to one of many collection containers in your neighborhood. They’re separated by white, green, and brown glass. They get recycled.
Clothes you bring to collection containers somewhere in your neighborhood or district.
Man, this became a long text. It’s quite the intricate system.
I can see in the shared bins how careless and space-wasteful some people are, butting full boxes in their original shape in there, while I always cut them up, taking up minimal space. I don’t think shared bins for costly trash would work.
The separation of packaging materials from general house waste can be somewhat of a hassle. I wonder how feasible automated sorting would be. Switzerland does it like that. I feel like it’s mostly because automated sorting was not as feasible when the system was introduced, and then it was an established system. It may also have to do with the calculation of the cost for the companies paying the packaging waste cost.
/edit: Added bolding to make the text more accessible/scan-able.
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US deep south. There is no recycling… everything just goes into a landfill. It’s fucking stupid.
We put trash in a colored bin on the street and it’s picked up once a week. There is no recycling pickup. The last town we lived in picked up recycling (and leaves, in the fall), so it’s disappointing. If we need brush, chemicals, or anything too large to fit in the bin removed, we have to request it by phone or online.
Three bins, Trash, Recycling, Yard Debris.
Recycling and Yard get picked up every week.
Trash is every other week.
Frankly, I wish trash was weekly too!
Thrash can and recycling bin. Everything is mixed in the bin so I expect most of it is sent to a third world country or ends up on a landfill anyways.
Recycling is a lie.
We (Delft, NL) have underground containers. You drop your trashbag through the hole and there is a sensor that detect when the container is full. At that moment the municipality comes to empty it. I like that I don’t have to store my trash in my appartment but can just drop it in the container whenever. But, the place when the containers are can get messy when they are full and neighbours are too lazy to walk the 200m to the next container and place their bag next to it instead, where seagulls rip it open.
The containers are HUGE. Sometimes the fire dept. rescues things like wedding rings from them. Also, there are several different kinds to split kinds of waste - paper, glass, textiles, plastics, residual and maybe some more i never use.
For bigger items or things like chemicals there is also a “milieustraat”, where you can drive into and the guys there tell you where to put your stuff.
Still for me this is the best option I can think of.
Other perspective from the Netherlands:
We have trash bags we can buy (€1,20 per bag) for general household waste. Plastics, metal containers and drink cartons go in a separate bag (0,15 per bag). These go out on the street for pickup.
Glass, plastic drink containers goes back to the shop for refund. Glass without caution goes in containers, separated by color.
For paper and organic waste we have a rolling bin that goes out on a separate date.
Clothes that can be reused go in a special container (or to a reshare store)
For most other things (furniture, building waste, furniture, chemicals) indeed the milieustraat is the place, though household materials that can be re used we drop at the recycling store.
I once called the police in amsterdam because of smoke coming out of one of those at 6 am on new years eve. Still unsure if the police was not impressed because I sounded too drunk to be trusted or because it was just the gazillionth of the night that was set on fire.
USA, Virginia: My county does not have municipal trash collection, so we either haul our own trash to convenience centers, or pay a private service to pick it up. The landfill and convenience centers are run by a private company and it seems to work pretty well, except for recycling. The county only recycles paper/carboard, metal, and #1 and #2 plastic, and for #2 plastic the opening of the container must be narrower than the container. We don’t recycle glass or any other plastics. Apparently my neanderthal neighbors couldn’t be arsed to rinse out the containers and the people whose job it was to sort it out refused to accept any more recycling from us until we made changes. And most of the county still just tosses everything in the trash compactors. I think our county-wide recycling rate is just under 25%.
I like the system better than when I lived in a city where we had trash pickup. I can go drop off when I need to instead of missing trash day, having trash pile up waiting for trash day, or having it not picked up because it was “too heavy,” or some other reason. It doesn’t cost me anything other than gas, and we can usually combine the drop off with grocery shopping or other errands. I just wish we were better at recycling. My daughter lives in a city with single-stream recycling - all the trash and recycling goes in the same container and it gets automatically sorted at a processing facility.
There are some little organisations like Pedal People that collect and dispose of waste via bicycle. I don’t have something like this in my area, but it’d be nice.
We have a blue bin for recyclables, a green bin for organics, and a trash can for non-recyclables. Leaf and yard trimmings are put in a bag or tied into a pile.
Sounds a lot like Japan. There’s colored bags that you can buy at the store for “combustible” and not waste. Then there’s metal and glass pickup, small yard waste (mostly twigs), electronics, paper, and certain plastic has a dropoff. I’ve never heard of trash police issuing fines, but they’ll leave your items behind if it’s the wrong day or type.
When I lived in the US it was just two bins - trash (which was really anything you can fit in a bag, nobody checks) and recycling. Recycling varied by municipality but it was mostly single-stream glass, metal, and most plastics. Things like plastic bags and Styrofoam couldn’t go in the recycling but most places like the grocer would take bags or fluorescent bulbs or batteries.
Of course, multiple studies have shown that most plastics just end up burned or in the ocean so guess it doesn’t much matter how they are collected…
Where i live the garbage man just drives past without stopping while everyone stands on the side of the road with their trash and then then tries to throw it in the back as he passes. He goes very slow though.
I have two bins. One black one for general trash and a county provided yellow bin for all recycling. Once a week, they come to curbside collect what you leave out. You are also allowed one “large” item per week of really any size. Threw out an old queensized boxspring once. Yard waste can be left in brown paper landscaping bags too once a week which has been really nice. Other places I’ve lived, it was a quarterly collection for yard waste. Any bulk metal collection must be scheduled or brought to the county dump directly.
I live on a very narrow street with a turn that the big truck can’t get up. So a guy comes in a pickup truck to get it. I can’t put too much out or else he’ll refuse it. Happened a couple times when I was gutting parts of my house. I just drove around the city and found random dumpsters.
This whole area does not recycle I found out. We’ll have separate collection for recycling, but it all goes to the same dump in this county.
We only have garbage, and “recycling”. Nothing else.
USA, Southeast. In general, you have 1 trashcan for trash and 1 recycling bin for everything that could potentially be recycled. Sometimes it’s just one can for ‘combined recycling’ though. And if you’re in an apartment, it’s usually all just one big dumpster. A service comes around once a week to collect those.
If recycling is being done, the load gets dumped through an automatic waste separator (a building sized conveyor belt with machines that separate items by density). They find all the metal & recycle that. Particularly nice services will also grab the cardboard/paper. But none of them can really separate the different types of plastic from each other, so all of that goes to the landfill.
Interesting to me, the most poor/rural areas appear to be the best at recycling, as for them you must bring your trash to a transfer station yourself. And those stations have voluntary bins for each of the recycling waste streams. So if you care enough to separate your plastic into the different types (we number them 1 - 7), there’s a bin for that.
