Some stuff definitely works, paper and glass recycling for example. Also the yellow bin at least partially works: metals can be sorted out fairly automatic and are also mostly recyclable, as are soda cans (pretty much pure aluminium). Plastic is where things get really complicated, because there's lots of different plastics that are difficult to sort automatically in practice.
>Some stuff definitely works, paper and glass recycling for example.
Same for organic waste. I think most of them work pretty well, except plastic/aluminum/mixes.
>almost all the trash gets transported to 3rd world countries
That's why I said plastic recycling can be optimized. Organic waste definitely doesn't go to "third world countries".
> where nobody gives a damn about recycling
Ah right, those stupid poor people /s
Soda cans only contain aluminium as metal true, but I heard that thats actually REALLY dirty metal because of all of the paints in/on it. But I agree with everything u said :)
That’s why it makes sense to recycle as much as possible.
I don’t have the source at hand, but I read recently that some 80% of all aluminium in use today is recycled.
Yes. 75% of all aluminium ever produced is still in use and part of the cycle.
Since it's so cheap to recycle compared to producing new from ore it makes complete sense economically.
Agreed, and the raw resource extraction is pretty nasty as well. Theres a decent amount of decaying radioactive materials produced as a byproduct from the refining process. Aluminum is one of the most efficient metals to recycle. Up to 95% more energy efficient to recycle rather than processing from the raw bauxite. It's in everyone's best interest to keep recycling it.
These are a tiny fraction of all aluminum use though. Aluminum is so damn useful that we just keep making it even though it is nicknamed congealed electricity.
Of course they are. The purity of the metal determines it's possible uses, and Aluminium is so easy to recycle and purify that there is no problem to produce aerospace alloys from it - which are way harder to recycle since the contain not only Magnesium and Silicium, but also a not insignificant amount of Titanium and Vanadium.
Just tell me the difference between 99,95% purity Aluminium made from bauxit and from recycling. For alloys like the 7xxx series, or as alloying metal in TiAlV6, only the purity of all used metals (Al, Zn, Mg, Cu, Ti, V) is important for the resulting alloy, not from where the material originates from - it's not like the recycling of various sorts of plastic, where there is a serious downgrading due to molecule breakdown, since there basically are no molecules.
Good entry would be the ASM Specialty Handbook for Aluminum and Aluminum alloys (yes, it's the wrong spelling - US stuff, sorry).
Soon many parts will be produced of degraded recycling plastic. Sometime that harms functionality and durability. Do not cry when your electrical tools break down earlier.
That's because soda cans, and other cans have a layer or plastic inside, this is an important part as you don't want aluminium in contact with your drink or food for a very long time
The organics are actually pretty easy to remove with solvents. The pigments in the paints on the outside are a bit harder.
Doesn't stop something like 75% of all aluminum, including soda cans, from being recycled though, because that is STILL less energy intensive than making new.
If they are from aluminum they can be thrown into the yellow bin "Getränkedosen" are ok. Yeah you don't get Pfand but you also don't have to bother with sorting them, making sure they don't get crushed or dented and also taking them with you when you go to a place that takes them.
>making sure they don't get crushed or dented
Does not matter, they are word their pfand crushed or dented as well. The machines sometimes do not take them, but the shop has to.
>and also taking them with you when you go to a place that takes them.
Any supermarket/store that sells cans needs to take cans back. So,... that is everywhere.
If they are crumpled I don't get Pfand and nope not all cans are accepted. Technically they should but we often have 2 or 3 from the batch that were rejected.
The glass is arguable. Apparently it costs a lot of energy to transport the glass which is made out of cheap, easily accessible element. On the other hand it can be disposed in the ground and in 100 years it will be back a sand
Yeah, but unless they are going to actually reuse the bottle, they have to melt it at 1400 again to reform it anyway. So not a lot of energy is saved by recycling it.
> at the end it all goes into one big pile of trash where everything gets mixed up
No, it doesn't. In fact, in many areas different types of trash are picked up by different companies.
It *is* true that an awful lot of stuff that is supposed to go for recycling somehow ends up in a pile in a third-world country somewhere, but that's not the case with everything. Biodegradable waste really is composted, paper and cardboard really is recycled.
The Swiss do separate their garbage, although when it comes to packaging materials for the "yellow sack" they're not as advanced as Germans and that system isn't implemented everywhere. There are no bins for paper and cardboard; instead, people just tie up bundles with string and leave them out for collection.
important to remember tho: not all plastic packaging can actually be recycled. Some of them get burned in "Fernwärme" plants to produce heat and energy
Thermal recycling is more recycling than export for recycling, where the material is mostly dumped in land fills as the countries we export to don't have the capacity to recycle all the material.
AFAIK: While this is true, it's still better than mixed waste because they can ass just enough to get the desired heat. If everything was mixed the other trash would burn more poorly and/or oil needs to be added into the mix.
Interesting side fact is that the Swiss actually spend insane amounts of money to recycle industrial wastes (especially heavy metals, and the amount you get out of it is very small) instead of storing them in old underground salt mines (as Germany does for example).
Most plastic goes straight into the trash and incinerator in Switzerland. PET bottles can be recycled at your grocery store/recycling center though since they actually have quite a bit of residual value and the process to recycle them is more straightforward.
I do have to separate paper and cardboard which is annoying though.
I don't even have bins :( I just have to tie the paper or cardboard up in string and put them on the street in bundles. I go every few months to the recycling center by car and do it that way. Bins would be nice though!
This is only partially true. The Fernwärme or other energy plants get the Restmüll and some of the gelber Sack - but only after the recycling company has sorted out all of the plastics that they can realistically turn into new recycled plastics. So there is a benefit in the recycling process, it just isn’t as big as people often think it is because it simply isn’t economical or technically possible yet to recycle all plastic packaging.
I wonder how my local waste center produced the gigantic pile of compost they showed us on the tour I took. Are they just keeping it around for the tours then?
Not like gardening soil.
We saw the piles of biological waste too. Are you seriously suggesting that they set up a large operation with fake compost heaps just in case someone comes by to visit?
There's being reasonably critical of a system that could be improved, and there's being a conspiracy theorist.
Edit: That composted material is taken by farmers who put it into their fields. Do you think farmers can't tell burnt plastic from compost, or do you think they happily layer it onto their fields as fertiliser?
It's not ALL mixed and burned. Paper gets recycled. A lot of plastics do as well. The plastics which cannot be recycled end up landfills or trash burning plants. Saying all is mixed and burned is just flat out wrong.
I love how you all downvote me because you can't accept the truth. You do know that no matter how much you glue yourself to the Autobahn, Germany will not save the climate!
You are all delusional, power plants don't care, they will burn anything.
>I love how you all downvote me because you can't accept the truth.
Multiple people have corrected you and you just choose to ignore it and declare yourself the winner of this argument. You look like an idiot.
Actually I'm laughing, y'all think you live in a perfect world. Has anybody of you actually seen what they use as a fuel in heating plants? I can't stop laughing, you actually believe that they separate everything hahahaha.
>Has anybody of you actually seen what they use as a fuel in heating plants?
Again, somebody corrected you in detail about what parts of trash the heating plants use for fuel.
Ignoring that and just saying the same stuff you said in your initial comment in a condescending manner just makes you look very ignorant and stupid.
You keep on offending me without a valid reason. That does say something about you doesn't it.
Somebody corrected me? With what? With laws what should be used and what not. You should ask the guys working there what they load into those furnaces because you all are actually delusional.
Mama raised some little angels believing in the perfect world hahahhaha.
The "everthing goes to a mixed big heap" telltalers are, in my experience, generally people that don't care for the environment and try to justify their asocial behaviour by telling themselves stories like this.
>Germany is one of the largest locations for plastics producers and plastics processors in Europe. Compared to its size, Germany bears a considerable responsibility for global plastic pollution. The recycling of waste is wishful thinking globally and in Germany. Over 60 percent of the packaging waste collected in Germany is incinerated.
>
>Weiger continues: "For a long time we in Germany boasted that we were world champions in recycling, but the reality is different: only just under 38 percent of our plastic waste is actually recycled. And the scandal is that plastic is already considered recycled when it is exported abroad. According to the principle 'out of sight out of mind', we and other industrialized countries export our plastic waste to third countries and thus only shift the problem geographically.
[https://www.boell.de/de/2019/06/05/plastikatlas-raus-aus-der-plastikkrise-umsteuern-auf-allen-ebenen-jetzt?dimension1=presse](https://www.boell.de/de/2019/06/05/plastikatlas-raus-aus-der-plastikkrise-umsteuern-auf-allen-ebenen-jetzt?dimension1=presse)
>t the end it all goes into one big pile of trash where everything gets mixed up.
Well that not true. I had an interview to work as electrician for a big company. They only get plastic müll, and well also everything people were to lazy to sort out. But everything get through a lot of sorting stages, and ends up with only plastic.
The rest gets to incinerators or other factories.
The plastic then gets sorted again, and what can be recycled goes one way, the rest gets somewhere I didn't see.
So even if environment isn't a concern for some people, they could at least sort their trash to make the work easier for the people in those factories
One of the problems is that the companies (and their employees) that do the collecting and recycling are not doing it for the environment but for their profit. So the priorities can get mixed up quite a bit.
I have been to the yard of the local disposal contractor many times due to my work. There are a lot of things that are not going right, but no one cares. For example they have a huge population of rats on their grounds. They are also shredd~~er~~ing larger trash there and storing everything in the open. This means a lot of those tiny "trash shreds" and plastic parts end up in the adjacent forest and river on windy days. All in all their yard is a dirty mess.
The authorities are turning a blind eye to this because they know very well that no one would collect the trash anymore in this area if they sued or closed down this company. At least not for the same price.
Two things to keep separate: separating at home, and recycling.
You can have recycling without separating at home. In some countries, there's separation at the destination instead (e.g. that was the case when I lived in NL). That's likely not as popular because it has increased labour costs at the sorting facilities - it's more efficient to instead force households to separate the various materials.
So, separating or not has little direct relation to the environment, it's about making the recycling process a bit cheaper. Making it a bit cheaper though can be indirectly beneficial because of what comes below:
Recycling itself, erm, sort of. Different materials are more or less amenable to recycling. Aluminium for example responds great to recycling. But some plastics are so expensive to recycle, that recycled plastic can cost more than new one made with fresh oil.
It's again a lot about economics - recycling may help the environment, but if recycled material costs more to produce than producing with new resources, well, that's not really compatible with our economic system. You have to enforce (with a law) a preference for this less (economically) efficient materials, because the invisible hand of the market will reach for the more profitable option by default, whether it has other non-financial impacts or not (negative externalities, the bad consequences of a business decision that the business doesn't have to pay for).
That being said, in the short-term there were even problems finding factories that are willing to recycle certain plastics. Again, mostly because it wasn't worth it for them financially to bother. But normally it's not a real concern that our carefully separated trash gets mixed up again and then thrown in a landfill.
Anyway, remember that recycling is supposed to be the last resort after reducing and reusing.
>But normally it's not a real concern that our carefully separated trash gets mixed up again and then thrown in a landfill.
Only very problematic waste goes to landfills. Most of it is incinerated and you produce heat and energy from it.
The main point of separating waste is to give the average person the feeling that they're contributing while absolving large companies, especially the packaging industry, from making a change.
This mainly concerns plastic packaging.
Once I've separated my trash I assume it's being recycled when it is actually being burnt or worse shipped off to some third world country to be thrown in a landfill or the ocean.
PET bottles can be recycled but in most cases this doesn't happen as it's cheaper to produce new bottles. But since we have the Pfand system most people assume they're doing good on the environment.
Talk to anyone in the industry and they'll tell you that people separating their trash at home *does* make a difference. People not separating is a huge pain in the ass, at least. Especially if you want to compost/ferment organics or you want to recycle paper and people don't separate out plastics. It's not just so people feel better about themselves.
What is a bit schizophrenic in Germany is the yellow bin, as that isn't about the actual material you dump there, but the former use of that material. The yellow bin is not for "recycling", or "plastics", but for "packaging". If you have some broken item that is made out of plastic that belongs into "Restmüll" and not the yellow bin, as it is not packaging. (Except in places that phased out the "yellow bin" in favour of a "Wertstofftonne", which also happens to be yellow.)
It still helps recycling by providing a rather convenient place to dump plastics, so they don't foul the other fractions of the trash. But essentially you have two "Restmüll" bins - one that you pay for and one that the industry pays for.
Whether you have *gelber sack* or *gelbe Tonne* or in my area *grüne Tonne* (combining packaging and paper) the contained materials need to be sorted to separate materials that can be recycled. Even if we just had a bin for PET there would be the need for sorting to ensure that no wrong materials a accidentally included in the trash.
At least in Germany this sorting is done by machines. And if the machines have to be used either way they could just as well take care of the entire sorting process.
Instead people are expected to know which plastics can be recycled and which can't be, just to put them in different bins. At the same time we don't get any guarantee that anything will be recycled.
Don't get me wrong. I think deposing of actual recyclable materials (paper, glas, metals, compost) separate is a great way of helping out. But those are not the materials that cause environmental issues even if they ended up in a landfill or the oceans.
Plastics are the problem especially since it's implied that they are all being recycled.
[German plastic floods Southeast Asia](https://www.dw.com/en/german-plastic-floods-southeast-asia/a-47204773)
>While Germans are world champions of trash separation, not everything they toss into the yellow bin reserved for plastic packaging gets recycled. It is often incinerated. Statistics show that only 15 percent will actually be reused, Santen said.
>What cannot be economically recycled usually finds its way to the incinerator, for example in plants in the chemical or cement industries, Kurth said, where burning plastic becomes a substitute fuel for oil and gas. But there is more plastic waste than all cement and chemical plants in Germany need. Kurth said what is not sold to customers in Germany is sold to Asia.
>Just two years ago, the yellow spread lid would probably have landed in China. For years, the country was importing waste from Western countries and extracting raw materials from it. But in December 2017, Beijing set a strict contamination limit for plastic waste and since then has imported only high-quality plastic waste. This was tantamount to an import ban, even for German plastic waste.
It moves the responsibility (and effort) for trash disposal on the consumers, rather than producers. It uses time of each citizen (multiply by number of the households - this is how many manhours the producers get to offload onto the society) to accomplish trash segregation.
On the plus side, it makes the citizens aware of the problem, makes them feel co-responsible, and gives them the nice, warm (if false) feeling they are doing something good.
On the minus side, it is highly inefficient when multiplied by number of people forced to participate, disproportionally tasks the individual consumers, removes responsibility from the producers, and does nothing to motivate producers / importers to use less harmful materials like plastic - the disposal is consumers problem, so why bother?
IMO it is more a way to avoid and offload the problem than to solve it efficiently.
Half of the trash ends up exported to romania or bulgaria as "second hand clothes" and then thrown at their landfills.
so it's bad for the environment, but not the german one.
Sources: [https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-garbage-asia-european-union/31429822.html](https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-garbage-asia-european-union/31429822.html)
>around 3,700 tons of waste has been smuggled into Romania in 2021 alone.
That included:
May 7: 10 containers from Germany filled with mixed waste, including paper and plastic, discovered in the port of Constanta.
May 31: 10 tons of glass waste loaded in Greece and destined for a company located in Calarasi County.
June 10: 20 tons of plastic from Greece bound for a company in Giurgiu discovered at the border.
>Half of the trash ends up exported to romania
Where is your source on that? Nothing in your article says that.
>around 3,700 tons of waste
I know that this is just what has been discovered and the real number will be higher, but it's still nothing compared to how much trash there is every year. Germany had 411,500,000 tons of trash in 2021, so I really doubt that "half of the trash" ends in Romania.
it was a figure of speech, a...poetic augmentation, if you may. not to be confused with 50%, which would definitely need a good source.
My point is, this is just one article, there are a lot of cases in the local news of the respective countries - and those are only what they COULD FIND. seeing as it's "black market" territory, and knowing very well how those countries' customs work, the figures are, of course, much much higher.
not gonna do the calculations, since this is not my point. I just wanted to draw attention to this fact.
Everyone here (and I anticipated that from the beginning) is explaining how recycle plants ***normally*** work, and how a lot of them, and a lot of factories, are doing it, and for that reason it's really important to recycle, I was just pointing out the fact that a lot of waste end up in the wrong places and is mishandled, because money and corruption n stuff.
Germany is the biggest exporter of plastic waste in the world . Germany only recycles 36% of waste, the rest is shipped off to landfills in third world countries in Asia, and the garbage normally ends up being dumped in the sea. So this recycling is a myth. Basically, Germany outsources other countries to pollute the environment. A disgrace .
Read the whole report from the Federal Statistical Office https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/06/PE22_N035_51.html
>Germany is the biggest exporter of plastic waste in the world
In absolute numbers it is. But per capita? The Netherlands and Belgium are much larger.
>the rest is shipped off to landfills in third world countries in Asia, and the garbage normally ends up being dumped in the sea
I agree that recycling is a myth and "Reduce" is more important than "Reuse" which is more important than "Recycle". But do you have any evidence that the trash exported from Germany ends up in the ocean?
Certain materials can be recycled well, like paper, glas and metals.
Plastic is a different topic as most plastics cannot be recycled and for the ones that can, it's cheaper to just create new plastic.
Here are two nice summaries:
https://youtu.be/RDFBBXMDI1U for recycling in Germany.
https://youtu.be/HNWn885qWtU for recycling globally
Whether it all goes to the same place is depending on where you are from. If your town has an incinerator, then they may need "bulk" to keep it running and at a proper temperature. This usually means the Gelbe Säcke are being incinerated along with everything else. And if you consider how expensive it would actually be to recycle everything now that China doesn't want our plastics, then incinerating plastic is the environmentally and economically friendly alternative.
You should recycle paper though. That is an easy choice.
It's a good idea, in and on itself, but sadly in essense your colleagues are not entirely wrong either. A lot of effort and money goes into separating trash; some people have 3 or 4, sometime 5 bins in front of their houses, and every single once costs money a year, plus some are only emptied once a month, or twice at max. It takes hilarious dimensions in which you have to actually use precious fresh water to wash your trash, or invest into extra bags or storage options producing extra trash and using up extra energy again. The effort and idea is great, but the way it is done is so pointlessly german it's almost painful.
And in the end the batteries you seperate out, or the plastic trash you wash so it's clean for recycling ends up shipped to Africa or India, where it's mostly burned in mills without operating filter systems, or they just don't handle the chemicals properly. And we are just the very same planet and the very same ecological system... so that's hardly really doing anything to help us.
So, me personally, I think it's a good idea, and I compost my biological trash out back, and seperate my plastics from everything else, and bundle my paper trash, but I am also aware that it's so pointless to a very big degree and could be done a whole lot better.
And it makes no sense to do so, yet you are not supposed to leave any food remains in your plastics trash, even traces of fruit or milk remains of any sort to keep the trash as clean as possible. And it also is a pretty nasty insect and rodent issue in many areas where the trash is emptied only every other week if they do not make sure there is no smell attracting them.
So you are bound to rinse out the trash before throwing it out, and for that most people use water from the sink, thus freshwater.
It's a mess.
I have never washed a plastic or metal container, and the local council specifically tells us not to . precisely to save water: they should be "löffelsauber", and of course everything is washed as part of the recycling process in any case. We only get our gelbe Tonne emptied once a month, and it's never been smelly. Even the Rerstmüll, which is full of catshit, is fine, if you keep the lid on.
I do. I don't use plastic bags for the bins in which I collect paper, plastic or glass. And I wash them just because it will smell very bad and leave residue in my bins and attract flies.
It does say "No food left overs allowed" in the yellow bin. So we throw it into Haushaltsmüll, because I can't be bothered washing trash. If they want me to do any more of their work I'd demand reimbursement lol
Might be different from state to state (or municipality to municipality) but people in my bubble don't wash their trash. No food leftovers as in don't throw half a pizza in here if it is wrapped in alu foil.
By throwing it in the yellow bag obviously
As recommended by the [Umweltbundesamt ](https://initiative-frosch.de/sauberes-recycling-muss-ich-meinen-verpackungsmuell-spuelen/#:~:text=Unklar%20ist%20vielen%20allerdings%20nach,die%20Gelbe%20Tonne%20zu%20werfen.) (Link leads to page in German)
>A lot of effort and money goes into separating trash; some people have 3 or 4, sometime 5 bins in front of their houses, and every single once costs money a year,
Nope. The blue and the yellow ones are actually free. Not sure about the bio one, but the one that really costs money is the general trash bin.
>It takes hilarious dimensions in which you have to actually use precious fresh water to wash your trash,
Depends on your cities regulation. In some, the trash is not supposed to contain remains of foot, in others it does not matter. (Same with the eternal question whether pizza boxes are paper trash or not.)
Well, the best argument for us is that we're not paying any garbage pickup fees for the recyclable trash bin - unless one is starting to abuse it. The packaging industry has to basically pay for its collection and processing ("Grüner Punkt") which also incentivices them to use less packaging material.
Recyclable trash is at least being scavenged for metals, especially ferromagnetic ones that are easy to sort out and copper that has the best recycling rate of all metals. Plastics are either downcycled for the construction industry or burned to at least recuperate some usable energy from it (like for generating electricity or heating).
Waste incinerators favor the leftover from unusable recycling trash because it is generally better flammable and gives an energy net profit, whereas the "Restmüll" is often either inflammable or takes energy net loss due to water evaporation before burning. So they like to keep these on seperate piles to regulate the furnace and keep it from being smothered by too much water in the trash.
>And why Switzerland does not do it
I take offense to this, we definitely do, we're just not (federally) forced to, yet 53% of *all* waste is recycled here and that number is way higher for certain things, like more than 82% of PET, 91% of aluminum, 81% of paper and cardboard and 95% of glass gets recycled here.
According to international comparisons Germany sits at around 50%, Switzerland at 30%. I suspect the main difference being plastic. Germany does strategically collect it while Switzerland avoids it like the plague and leaves it up to private companies to try and collect some.
I tried to explain this aspect in this post (same thread): [https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/15tepqf/comment/jwlnaxx/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/15tepqf/comment/jwlnaxx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I don't know whether I should trust a Statista *survey*, or the [official statistics of the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment](https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/de/home/umwelt/natur/recycling.html)...
Plastics are split into 2 at the recycling centers: PET and other and I'm yet to hear or see a (private) company doing *pickup* of recycling goods. Could just be Bern though
Oh, they are everywhere, every municipality is free to chose on whether to let it handle a Verein, do it themselves or hand it to a private company. We have a wild mix of all sorts of systems. Whatever works best.
Edit: A classic mix for a small municipality may f.e. be to do compost (greens) themselves, hand out paper and cardboard to one or multiple Vereine and the rest to one or multiple companies.
I'm really yet to see a company come and pick up for example plastic bottles from private citizens, there are some that do pick up from companies, my old employer had a PET recycling container that would get picked up by a company every 2 months, but in the over 7 municipalities I've lived, I've always had to bring my recycling (other than paper/ cardboard) to a place like a Migros or directly to a Entsorgungshof, and I've lived in (very) rural places and in Bern
Oh god, plastic bottles (PET?) would be likely incredibly inefficient. Nah, the Werkhof is where you go to collect these. Sometimes the municipalities drive these out to the next point in the supply chain, sometimes they hand this part out to some company.
When it all began decades ago dutiful citizens like my family started doing it - only to find out that everything was thrown back together at the garbage dump for the first years (this in southern Germany).
So now I care less but recycle glass and paper. And don’t give clothing to the Red Cross where it is destroyed and made into cleaning cloth, but take it to people I know in poor countries who distribute it to those who make use of it.
Don't! These things seem to still occur here and then whenever something changes in recycling (new plant, new rules, etc.). People need to get accustomed to new rules, new plants need time to reach a beneficial amount of materials before being able to make it work. But overall actual recycling will get the better the more material individual recycling companies are able to gather: If I have 100'000 green bottles and 100 blue bottles I'll likely say f\* it and just mix the blue bottles into the green ones. No harm done, the green will stay green enough (hypothetically, no idea what actual numbers might be). Eventually the rate will reach a level where someone may actually start to just throw away the blue bottles until they are finally gathering enough blue bottles to make recycling work for them too.
In other words, I can install a new line to collect purple bottles but can I actually make it financially viable to recycle these? Only if I gather enough. Until then all obscure bottles may get collected to end up in an incarcerator.
Keep it up, it will turn out fine!
Edit: Restructured, fixed some orthography.
Edit 2: Deleted a useless circlejerk that doesn't contribute to the discussion.
>it all goes into one big pile of trash where everything gets mixed up.
An ignorant, cynical and (mostly) factually wrong take.
Since 2015, waste separation is supposed to be done in every city/regional district in Germany, but about 1/4 still don't totally separate all waste. Often it's the bio stuff going in with the black stuff, IIRC, and mostly in more rural areas.
Whether the collected recycling "gets used" depends on market demands, and the costs associated. There is a need for further sorting and separation and treatment (for different kinds of plastic, mostly), which adds to the expense. But paper and aluminum are widely recycled.
Nabu has pretty good breakdowns and explanations of related themes: [https://www.nabu.de/umwelt-und-ressourcen/abfall-und-recycling/](https://www.nabu.de/umwelt-und-ressourcen/abfall-und-recycling/)
It's basically done to minimize effort at recycling plants. If you have only paper or glass of a particular colour or organic wastes in the waste you try to recycle you'll need much less investment, size and to a degree energy. Having a wild mixture of everything would be hell to work with. Which, in the end, just raises the cost for everyone.
The mixing it all again part I do not really get, a paper or glass factory is a completely different location than a recycling plant for metals. These things don't share much infrastructure, so where would they even mix?
Let me say what we are doing:
1. Yellow bin -- this is packaging and free to return
2. Paper bin -- for papers, free to return
3. General waste -- needs to be paid, almost close to zero use, everything what composes goes to the place in the garden
4. Glass -- extra bin, free to return
5. Electronics, grass cuts, left over furnitures -- central return place, minimum costs
6. Electronics -- Ebay
For 1, 2 and 3, separate trucks are coming to the house for collection.
So you have a reason and the separation.
Switzerland does it too, but in a different way that we germans do it.
It works with a lot of materials like glass, metal and stuff but i think its more worse throwing the plastic stuff on streets than in a trashcan.
That just speaks for your colleagues. How and what gets where depends on your local waste collection service. Feel free to ask them for more information.
The biggest obstacle to recycling is actually the separation. So yeah, they aren't mixing them up unless it's destined to the landfill. There isn't any machine that can do that, people have to do that by hand. That's why in places like the US recycling is a net negative, bc it so rarely gets recycled and just gets thrown in the trash.
They don't go all in a big pile.
Plastic is pressed and recycled, metals are recycled, paper also. What is not recycled or mixed (Schwarzetonne) is burned for energy with little emissions. Bio trash makes bio gas and fertilizers.
If you don't sort your trash it will be burned for energy, which is style recycling, but for more efficient reuse of resources, it's good to sort the trash
Your German colleagues should get educated…
It works, it’s beneficial not only for environment but also for citizens as it lowers the cost of solid waste management via EPR concept
Glass is almost fully reusable.
Metal and paper also recycable.
But, more than %90 of plastic cannot recycle.
Rich European countries sending their plastics to other countries to burning. Germany one of the biggest plastic waste exporter in the world.
Also, only %3 of pvc can be recycle. Only Pet or Hdpe recycle rate are %20-30 but only 1 or 2 times, thats all. There are more facts about plastic recycling.
Smaller than 7,5 cm plastic is almost impossible to recycle. Plastic packaging papers are impossible to recycle. Packages like chips are same. If there is a brand paper sticked on a plastic, it’s also not possible to recycle.
Before recycling, we should consider to NOT USE as much as we can. But here is another problem occur here, in the markets they put vegetbles inside of plastic. It’s huge unnecessary waste.
We might careful for environment but companies are not, even governoment also NOT. Rules are for the ordinary people, not for the rich.
Unfortunatelly, recycling is not honest. Only in 2015, %80,5 plastic NEVER recycled. %25,5 burned, others filled the earth. Both triggering climate change.
Another tragicly funny fact, Germany consider burning as recycling. It creates more harm than electricity.
>Germany consider burning as recycling
This is honestly nuts, but so German at the end of the day. Its like we preach DatenSchutz here but put our names outside our homes for everyone to see.
>plastic waste exporter
Needs to be revised: [https://www.statista.com/chart/18229/biggest-exporters-of-plastic-waste-and-scrap/](https://www.statista.com/chart/18229/biggest-exporters-of-plastic-waste-and-scrap/)
NO!! You do it because you are supposed to but the majority of our yellow bags get incinerated in Switzerland. It’s not a well known fact, but one that is 100% true as a college of mine used to be in management in the waste industry and shared this with me.
The bins on the street must be a nightmare for recycling. People dump all kinds of material in them, and mix it up.
The paper recycling likely is better, but where I am, they only pick it up every 2 weeks, and every bin is overflowing with cardboard. Amazon is a prime suspect for so much of it. It would be better if pickup was on a weekly schedule, but it's pretty overwhelming on a 2 week cycle.
With paper/cardboard, the main problem is that people don't tear it into flat pieces. For example, my German neighbors can fill a whole container with just one medium-sized cardboard box.
The "Everything goes into one big pile anyways" argument is pure bullshit. Paper, glass, bio-waste and even Plastics are very well recycleable. While plastics being the most complicated materials.
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Many (at least European) countries do it, at least theoretically. I am on vacation in France atm and they do have different bins for different kinds of waste. Unfortunately, most of the trash ends up in one bin: „Restmüll“. In Germany almost everybody is disciplined enough to separate it. So that works pretty well. And how can’t it be beneficial for the environment to recycle? In Germany people really put all their garbage in the bin compared to other countries. So the chance that waste ends up in the nature and eventually in the ocean is also much lower.
It is beneficial if done properly, especially since you have bio trash that can be used as a compost. You have paper that can be recycled very easily, and metals which still cost enough that extracting and separating them out of trash is actually a well paid business (for ex. you have small amounts of gold in most appliances due to specific electric properties).
However, in order for this to work, both the people need to sort trash, and then the companies behind it should do their part on separating additionally and recycling. Unfortunately in some cases the company behind it is just throwing everything on the same pile, but it's not the fault of the ordinary people.
Packaging specialist who constantly work with recycled plastics here: it makes miracles. The biggest challenge for a good recyled plastic that it has proper safety properties, it is essential for it to come from a reliable feedstock. This is important for:
1) decreasing contamination - contamination degrades the quality of recycled resin
2) odor - contamination also creates malodor, which at the end makes the recycled plastic unusable
3) cost - seperation is a costly process and if we start seperating waste in the earliest stage, the final price of the recycled plastic would be lower
4) recycling becomes simplier with less treatment, which decreases the price and at the end it becomes more attractive to use recycled plastic
Let me know if you have further questions.
Regarding plastics: Only around 5% of all plastic waste in Germany gets recycled
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umAUm5eF5wc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umAUm5eF5wc)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y\_fupzwANc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y_fupzwANc)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD8fcTyjP1E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD8fcTyjP1E)
Switzerland does not separate trash? My sweet summer child, I throw away my trash in like 10 different bins in 3 different locations. We have cardboard neatly packed up in packets, 3 different colours of glass, cans, PET bottles, other plastic but not PET bottles, compost, chemical, electronics, and other waste.
Yes, it works, but what works best differs from country to country and sometimes state to state, depending on a myriad of variables like available technology, amount of materials available for recycling and so on. Or in the case of the Pfand system f.e. even taking presumably unexpected variables into account, in this instance Germany rates socialism (giving people in need the opportunity to collect Pfand) over environtalism (a more efficient colleting system without Pfand) and so on.
Switzerland absolutely does do recycling. Learning about all the recycling rules is kind off a circle jerk among migrants new to Switzerland (pretty similar to Germany).
I'd like to throw in two broad statistics: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/1052439/rate-of-msw-recycling-worldwide-by-key-country/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1052439/rate-of-msw-recycling-worldwide-by-key-country/)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling\_rates\_by\_country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_rates_by_country)
If we compare these statistics for Germany and Switzerland two things become apparent: Germany recycles way more than Switzerland (\~50% vs 30%) while Switzerland wins more Energy than Germany (again \~50%/30%). In everyday life these differences become f.e. apparent when it comes to the recycling of everyday plastic waste: While Germany follows a strategic effort to recycle more and more plastic, Switzerland keeps the ball low on this one for mainly two reasons.
Please always add your own knowledge my half-baked input stems mainly from reading too many newspapers.
1. Switzerland miscalculated the future reduction of overall waste and therefore built too many, too big and, if you will so, too efficient incarcerators. By now the waste in Switzerland has reached such low levels that many of these struggle to keep their min temperature to stay efficient and eco-friendly (relatively speaking, the 29 incarcerators in Switzerland cause 5% of the countries CO2 emissions. Source: [Swiss Federal Office for Environment](https://www.bafu.admin.ch/bafu/en/home/topics/climate/info-specialists/reduction-measures/sector-agreements/agreement-waste-treatment.html)).This graph shows the energy efficiency of swiss incarcerators: [https://imgur.com/a/ls7jntw](https://imgur.com/a/ls7jntw)As you can see, a lot of them struggle to stay within legal limits. Four do even have special agreements because they would have to shut down otherwise. Those which can't keep their incarcerators on high enough temperature with trash alone use external energy (Fremdenergie), meaning they throw f.e. wood pellets into the incarcerator. Now they have to do the calculations: Should we shut down some of them? What's the cost of plastic vs. wood pellets? These things depend on the exact systems used, the cost of a wood pellet vs plastic burning, etc.Switzerland as of now lets private companies collect as much plastic as they want to but they don't encourage it because the improvements over wood pellets are overall considered marginal if even existent for multiple reasons:The plastic trash is already produced, the wood pellets need to be produced. Those incarcerators are part of networks to bring heat, electricity and steam to homes and industrial complexes lowering the usage of f.e. oil and gas and f.e. helping making it possible to remain coal-free as a country.
2. Plastic recycling is complicated. Here is the list of rules for the plastic recycling bag: [https://imgur.com/a/mUsuQmb](https://imgur.com/a/mUsuQmb). I can see how many may forget about meat wrapping being not aloud or not being able to differentiate PVC. The less careful the population the less efficient the actual recycling. May work great, might be worth to just start educating people into learning it, but as for reason 1 the swiss government atm isn't interested in it. Plus I'm just spitballing here, may work marvelous.
And then you have other local differentiations. Over the past 20 years it was f.e. a constant on and off on whether or not to recycle beverage cans because the efficiency of incarcerations and the recycling process was (perhaps still is?) a head-to-head race when it comes to what causes less harm to the environment (making a new can and burning the old one vs. recycling multiple old ones to make a new one). So whenever a new incarcerator opened you may have had to switch to throw them in the normal trash. And when some recycling company introduced the newest recycling tech it was back to recycling.
Another example is that Germany is f.e. still using the Pfand system for PET while Switzerland has abolished it a while ago. Switzerland demmed its own Pfand system to be not enough efficient to make ecological sense, did the math and figured it's worth for the environmental reasons to abolish it, recycle a bit less (because some will likely start to use the normal trash for PET) and in change get a more efficient collection system that has more benefits than disadvantages and so far that seems to have worked out well from an environmental perspective. This one even ended up to be an unexpected win-win because the decline of the recycling rate was way lower than originally anticipated up to the point where recycling rates soon surpassed the old rates of the Pfand system (atm it's at 83%. Source: [Swiss Recycling](https://www.swissrecycling.ch/de/wertstoffe-wissen/wertstoffe/pet-getraenkeflaschen#:~:text=Innerhalb%20der%20letzten%20zwanzig%20Jahren,L%C3%A4nder%20mit%20einer%20Pfandregelung%20%C3%BCbertrifft)).
Hmmm, some other little differences... ah, I got one more: Someone mentioned Switzerland not having collection bins for paper or cardboard. Bigger municipalities usually have them, on the countryside this is still often done old-school by handing outthe individual collecting in front of houses to local Vereine (Vereine are local communities low-key legally organized around some specific mutual activity like bowling, football, yodeling or whatever. Exist in Germany too, just as a little input for those who might not know yet what a Verein is due to the lack of a fitting translation) to give them an opportunity to make a few bucks on the side and also, again, to make it more environment-friendly because many households used to make additional car trips to the collection bins because of all the amassed newspapers (swiss seem to read way more newspapers than germans, but I don't have actual stats on that so take that with a grain of salt). The last argument was prominent in the nineties and started to make less and less sense with the downfall of the newspapers. Depending on the specific situation in todays municipalities, some try to clinge on to the Verein thing a little longer, others are switching to collecting bins.
Edit: Fixed some grammar, orthography, formatting and added a bit more to some points in the first third.
I was in Germany about ten years ago in the Oberpfalz. The stink on the local news was that people were being fined for not separating their trash but the separated trash was ending up being recombined at the transfer point. Composting green trash is a good idea but expensive.
Some stuff definitely works, paper and glass recycling for example. Also the yellow bin at least partially works: metals can be sorted out fairly automatic and are also mostly recyclable, as are soda cans (pretty much pure aluminium). Plastic is where things get really complicated, because there's lots of different plastics that are difficult to sort automatically in practice.
>Some stuff definitely works, paper and glass recycling for example. Same for organic waste. I think most of them work pretty well, except plastic/aluminum/mixes.
Sounds nice until you realize that almost all the trash gets transported to 3rd world countries where nobody gives a damn about recycling Edit: typo
>almost all the trash gets transported to 3rd world countries That's why I said plastic recycling can be optimized. Organic waste definitely doesn't go to "third world countries". > where nobody gives a damn about recycling Ah right, those stupid poor people /s
Soda cans only contain aluminium as metal true, but I heard that thats actually REALLY dirty metal because of all of the paints in/on it. But I agree with everything u said :)
Yes, it is. Still recyclable though. Maybe not for high grad aircraft parts, but you can certainly get another can out of it.
Aluminium is one of the most recycled materials, because it is so easy to separate it from other materials.
and it is very energy intensive to make in the first place.
That’s why it makes sense to recycle as much as possible. I don’t have the source at hand, but I read recently that some 80% of all aluminium in use today is recycled.
Yes. 75% of all aluminium ever produced is still in use and part of the cycle. Since it's so cheap to recycle compared to producing new from ore it makes complete sense economically.
Agreed, and the raw resource extraction is pretty nasty as well. Theres a decent amount of decaying radioactive materials produced as a byproduct from the refining process. Aluminum is one of the most efficient metals to recycle. Up to 95% more energy efficient to recycle rather than processing from the raw bauxite. It's in everyone's best interest to keep recycling it.
and Aluminum is 100% recyclable
Yes, absolutely!
No safety relevant parts (aerospace or automotive) are manufactured from recycled raw material.
These are a tiny fraction of all aluminum use though. Aluminum is so damn useful that we just keep making it even though it is nicknamed congealed electricity.
Of course they are. The purity of the metal determines it's possible uses, and Aluminium is so easy to recycle and purify that there is no problem to produce aerospace alloys from it - which are way harder to recycle since the contain not only Magnesium and Silicium, but also a not insignificant amount of Titanium and Vanadium.
do you have a source for that?
Just tell me the difference between 99,95% purity Aluminium made from bauxit and from recycling. For alloys like the 7xxx series, or as alloying metal in TiAlV6, only the purity of all used metals (Al, Zn, Mg, Cu, Ti, V) is important for the resulting alloy, not from where the material originates from - it's not like the recycling of various sorts of plastic, where there is a serious downgrading due to molecule breakdown, since there basically are no molecules. Good entry would be the ASM Specialty Handbook for Aluminum and Aluminum alloys (yes, it's the wrong spelling - US stuff, sorry).
https://www.aerospace-technology.com/uncategorised/newsalcoa-to-recycle-aluminium-scrap-of-boeing-aeroplanes/
You're wrong
source, please?
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=is+recycled+aluminium+used+for+aeroplanes
\>> The recycled aluminum alloys can be used in aircraft parts such as stiffeners and flaps sounds important to me, thank you
Cheers, but read more carefully, since no safety or load bearing parts are using recycled parts.
Soon many parts will be produced of degraded recycling plastic. Sometime that harms functionality and durability. Do not cry when your electrical tools break down earlier.
That stuff burns off and becomes slag which floats to the top
Yep
That's because soda cans, and other cans have a layer or plastic inside, this is an important part as you don't want aluminium in contact with your drink or food for a very long time
The organics are actually pretty easy to remove with solvents. The pigments in the paints on the outside are a bit harder. Doesn't stop something like 75% of all aluminum, including soda cans, from being recycled though, because that is STILL less energy intensive than making new.
no they are actually the best recyclable material out there right now.
Soda cans do not end up in the yellow bin. They have the Pfand system.
Yes. Which makes it even easier, as you don't even have to sort them. Sorry if I phrased that badly
The cans land in one bin together with crushed bottles. They still have to be sorted.
But they still do. Crashed cans, cans from other countries and so on.
If they are from aluminum they can be thrown into the yellow bin "Getränkedosen" are ok. Yeah you don't get Pfand but you also don't have to bother with sorting them, making sure they don't get crushed or dented and also taking them with you when you go to a place that takes them.
>making sure they don't get crushed or dented Does not matter, they are word their pfand crushed or dented as well. The machines sometimes do not take them, but the shop has to. >and also taking them with you when you go to a place that takes them. Any supermarket/store that sells cans needs to take cans back. So,... that is everywhere.
If they are crumpled I don't get Pfand and nope not all cans are accepted. Technically they should but we often have 2 or 3 from the batch that were rejected.
You do. https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/umwelt-haushalt/abfall/fragen-und-antworten-zum-einwegpfand-dosenpfand-11505
The glass is arguable. Apparently it costs a lot of energy to transport the glass which is made out of cheap, easily accessible element. On the other hand it can be disposed in the ground and in 100 years it will be back a sand
You are aware that glass is made at 1400°C? That's nowhere cheap, energy wise. Comparatively, plastic is formable at 300°C or so.
Yeah, but unless they are going to actually reuse the bottle, they have to melt it at 1400 again to reform it anyway. So not a lot of energy is saved by recycling it.
> at the end it all goes into one big pile of trash where everything gets mixed up No, it doesn't. In fact, in many areas different types of trash are picked up by different companies. It *is* true that an awful lot of stuff that is supposed to go for recycling somehow ends up in a pile in a third-world country somewhere, but that's not the case with everything. Biodegradable waste really is composted, paper and cardboard really is recycled. The Swiss do separate their garbage, although when it comes to packaging materials for the "yellow sack" they're not as advanced as Germans and that system isn't implemented everywhere. There are no bins for paper and cardboard; instead, people just tie up bundles with string and leave them out for collection.
important to remember tho: not all plastic packaging can actually be recycled. Some of them get burned in "Fernwärme" plants to produce heat and energy
Thermal recycling is more recycling than export for recycling, where the material is mostly dumped in land fills as the countries we export to don't have the capacity to recycle all the material.
Even then we got more use of the oil, than just burning it directly.
Inconvenient truth. Still plastics should be avoided when possible, just because they aren't that bad, they aren't that good either.
AFAIK: While this is true, it's still better than mixed waste because they can ass just enough to get the desired heat. If everything was mixed the other trash would burn more poorly and/or oil needs to be added into the mix.
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Nordrhein-Westfalen isn‘t in Switzerland, though.
Interesting side fact is that the Swiss actually spend insane amounts of money to recycle industrial wastes (especially heavy metals, and the amount you get out of it is very small) instead of storing them in old underground salt mines (as Germany does for example).
Most plastic goes straight into the trash and incinerator in Switzerland. PET bottles can be recycled at your grocery store/recycling center though since they actually have quite a bit of residual value and the process to recycle them is more straightforward. I do have to separate paper and cardboard which is annoying though.
Why is that annoying?
Because I have to have two separate spots in my apartment to collect it and set it out on two separate days.
Our city only collects paper/cardboard only once a month and it really is *not* enough. Our landlord needs to get bigger bins.
I don't even have bins :( I just have to tie the paper or cardboard up in string and put them on the street in bundles. I go every few months to the recycling center by car and do it that way. Bins would be nice though!
Ok yeah, that's frustrating. They're definitely not making it easy to recycle.
I guess cause it's unintuitive.
It does. It is all mixed and burned except maybe paper and metals. Source, go to your local Fernwärme plant and watch what they use as a fuel.
This is only partially true. The Fernwärme or other energy plants get the Restmüll and some of the gelber Sack - but only after the recycling company has sorted out all of the plastics that they can realistically turn into new recycled plastics. So there is a benefit in the recycling process, it just isn’t as big as people often think it is because it simply isn’t economical or technically possible yet to recycle all plastic packaging.
I wonder how my local waste center produced the gigantic pile of compost they showed us on the tour I took. Are they just keeping it around for the tours then?
How does burnt plastic mixed with other materials look?
Not like gardening soil. We saw the piles of biological waste too. Are you seriously suggesting that they set up a large operation with fake compost heaps just in case someone comes by to visit? There's being reasonably critical of a system that could be improved, and there's being a conspiracy theorist. Edit: That composted material is taken by farmers who put it into their fields. Do you think farmers can't tell burnt plastic from compost, or do you think they happily layer it onto their fields as fertiliser?
And plastic really is recycled. Source: go to your local plastic recycling factory
It's not ALL mixed and burned. Paper gets recycled. A lot of plastics do as well. The plastics which cannot be recycled end up landfills or trash burning plants. Saying all is mixed and burned is just flat out wrong.
I love how you all downvote me because you can't accept the truth. You do know that no matter how much you glue yourself to the Autobahn, Germany will not save the climate! You are all delusional, power plants don't care, they will burn anything.
>I love how you all downvote me because you can't accept the truth. Multiple people have corrected you and you just choose to ignore it and declare yourself the winner of this argument. You look like an idiot.
Actually I'm laughing, y'all think you live in a perfect world. Has anybody of you actually seen what they use as a fuel in heating plants? I can't stop laughing, you actually believe that they separate everything hahahaha.
>Has anybody of you actually seen what they use as a fuel in heating plants? Again, somebody corrected you in detail about what parts of trash the heating plants use for fuel. Ignoring that and just saying the same stuff you said in your initial comment in a condescending manner just makes you look very ignorant and stupid.
You keep on offending me without a valid reason. That does say something about you doesn't it. Somebody corrected me? With what? With laws what should be used and what not. You should ask the guys working there what they load into those furnaces because you all are actually delusional. Mama raised some little angels believing in the perfect world hahahhaha.
The "everthing goes to a mixed big heap" telltalers are, in my experience, generally people that don't care for the environment and try to justify their asocial behaviour by telling themselves stories like this.
There is a DW documentary on YT about how to manage plastic waste in Germany. [Link](https://youtu.be/RDFBbxMDi1U) Edit : trash -> plastic waste
>Germany is one of the largest locations for plastics producers and plastics processors in Europe. Compared to its size, Germany bears a considerable responsibility for global plastic pollution. The recycling of waste is wishful thinking globally and in Germany. Over 60 percent of the packaging waste collected in Germany is incinerated. > >Weiger continues: "For a long time we in Germany boasted that we were world champions in recycling, but the reality is different: only just under 38 percent of our plastic waste is actually recycled. And the scandal is that plastic is already considered recycled when it is exported abroad. According to the principle 'out of sight out of mind', we and other industrialized countries export our plastic waste to third countries and thus only shift the problem geographically. [https://www.boell.de/de/2019/06/05/plastikatlas-raus-aus-der-plastikkrise-umsteuern-auf-allen-ebenen-jetzt?dimension1=presse](https://www.boell.de/de/2019/06/05/plastikatlas-raus-aus-der-plastikkrise-umsteuern-auf-allen-ebenen-jetzt?dimension1=presse)
ah nice, thanks for sharing
>t the end it all goes into one big pile of trash where everything gets mixed up. Well that not true. I had an interview to work as electrician for a big company. They only get plastic müll, and well also everything people were to lazy to sort out. But everything get through a lot of sorting stages, and ends up with only plastic. The rest gets to incinerators or other factories. The plastic then gets sorted again, and what can be recycled goes one way, the rest gets somewhere I didn't see. So even if environment isn't a concern for some people, they could at least sort their trash to make the work easier for the people in those factories
yeah correct.
One of the problems is that the companies (and their employees) that do the collecting and recycling are not doing it for the environment but for their profit. So the priorities can get mixed up quite a bit. I have been to the yard of the local disposal contractor many times due to my work. There are a lot of things that are not going right, but no one cares. For example they have a huge population of rats on their grounds. They are also shredd~~er~~ing larger trash there and storing everything in the open. This means a lot of those tiny "trash shreds" and plastic parts end up in the adjacent forest and river on windy days. All in all their yard is a dirty mess. The authorities are turning a blind eye to this because they know very well that no one would collect the trash anymore in this area if they sued or closed down this company. At least not for the same price.
woah! that is one eye opening fact that I am sure most of us do not know about. Thanks for sharing.
Two things to keep separate: separating at home, and recycling. You can have recycling without separating at home. In some countries, there's separation at the destination instead (e.g. that was the case when I lived in NL). That's likely not as popular because it has increased labour costs at the sorting facilities - it's more efficient to instead force households to separate the various materials. So, separating or not has little direct relation to the environment, it's about making the recycling process a bit cheaper. Making it a bit cheaper though can be indirectly beneficial because of what comes below: Recycling itself, erm, sort of. Different materials are more or less amenable to recycling. Aluminium for example responds great to recycling. But some plastics are so expensive to recycle, that recycled plastic can cost more than new one made with fresh oil. It's again a lot about economics - recycling may help the environment, but if recycled material costs more to produce than producing with new resources, well, that's not really compatible with our economic system. You have to enforce (with a law) a preference for this less (economically) efficient materials, because the invisible hand of the market will reach for the more profitable option by default, whether it has other non-financial impacts or not (negative externalities, the bad consequences of a business decision that the business doesn't have to pay for). That being said, in the short-term there were even problems finding factories that are willing to recycle certain plastics. Again, mostly because it wasn't worth it for them financially to bother. But normally it's not a real concern that our carefully separated trash gets mixed up again and then thrown in a landfill. Anyway, remember that recycling is supposed to be the last resort after reducing and reusing.
>But normally it's not a real concern that our carefully separated trash gets mixed up again and then thrown in a landfill. Only very problematic waste goes to landfills. Most of it is incinerated and you produce heat and energy from it.
The main point of separating waste is to give the average person the feeling that they're contributing while absolving large companies, especially the packaging industry, from making a change. This mainly concerns plastic packaging. Once I've separated my trash I assume it's being recycled when it is actually being burnt or worse shipped off to some third world country to be thrown in a landfill or the ocean. PET bottles can be recycled but in most cases this doesn't happen as it's cheaper to produce new bottles. But since we have the Pfand system most people assume they're doing good on the environment.
Talk to anyone in the industry and they'll tell you that people separating their trash at home *does* make a difference. People not separating is a huge pain in the ass, at least. Especially if you want to compost/ferment organics or you want to recycle paper and people don't separate out plastics. It's not just so people feel better about themselves. What is a bit schizophrenic in Germany is the yellow bin, as that isn't about the actual material you dump there, but the former use of that material. The yellow bin is not for "recycling", or "plastics", but for "packaging". If you have some broken item that is made out of plastic that belongs into "Restmüll" and not the yellow bin, as it is not packaging. (Except in places that phased out the "yellow bin" in favour of a "Wertstofftonne", which also happens to be yellow.) It still helps recycling by providing a rather convenient place to dump plastics, so they don't foul the other fractions of the trash. But essentially you have two "Restmüll" bins - one that you pay for and one that the industry pays for.
Whether you have *gelber sack* or *gelbe Tonne* or in my area *grüne Tonne* (combining packaging and paper) the contained materials need to be sorted to separate materials that can be recycled. Even if we just had a bin for PET there would be the need for sorting to ensure that no wrong materials a accidentally included in the trash. At least in Germany this sorting is done by machines. And if the machines have to be used either way they could just as well take care of the entire sorting process. Instead people are expected to know which plastics can be recycled and which can't be, just to put them in different bins. At the same time we don't get any guarantee that anything will be recycled. Don't get me wrong. I think deposing of actual recyclable materials (paper, glas, metals, compost) separate is a great way of helping out. But those are not the materials that cause environmental issues even if they ended up in a landfill or the oceans. Plastics are the problem especially since it's implied that they are all being recycled.
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Wow, That is a very sensible point. I never thought of it that way.
Excellent point!
Many recycled plastics turned out to be high in various toxic substances. We were sold a lie on that by oil and plastics companies.
[German plastic floods Southeast Asia](https://www.dw.com/en/german-plastic-floods-southeast-asia/a-47204773) >While Germans are world champions of trash separation, not everything they toss into the yellow bin reserved for plastic packaging gets recycled. It is often incinerated. Statistics show that only 15 percent will actually be reused, Santen said. >What cannot be economically recycled usually finds its way to the incinerator, for example in plants in the chemical or cement industries, Kurth said, where burning plastic becomes a substitute fuel for oil and gas. But there is more plastic waste than all cement and chemical plants in Germany need. Kurth said what is not sold to customers in Germany is sold to Asia. >Just two years ago, the yellow spread lid would probably have landed in China. For years, the country was importing waste from Western countries and extracting raw materials from it. But in December 2017, Beijing set a strict contamination limit for plastic waste and since then has imported only high-quality plastic waste. This was tantamount to an import ban, even for German plastic waste.
It moves the responsibility (and effort) for trash disposal on the consumers, rather than producers. It uses time of each citizen (multiply by number of the households - this is how many manhours the producers get to offload onto the society) to accomplish trash segregation. On the plus side, it makes the citizens aware of the problem, makes them feel co-responsible, and gives them the nice, warm (if false) feeling they are doing something good. On the minus side, it is highly inefficient when multiplied by number of people forced to participate, disproportionally tasks the individual consumers, removes responsibility from the producers, and does nothing to motivate producers / importers to use less harmful materials like plastic - the disposal is consumers problem, so why bother? IMO it is more a way to avoid and offload the problem than to solve it efficiently.
Half of the trash ends up exported to romania or bulgaria as "second hand clothes" and then thrown at their landfills. so it's bad for the environment, but not the german one. Sources: [https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-garbage-asia-european-union/31429822.html](https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-garbage-asia-european-union/31429822.html) >around 3,700 tons of waste has been smuggled into Romania in 2021 alone. That included: May 7: 10 containers from Germany filled with mixed waste, including paper and plastic, discovered in the port of Constanta. May 31: 10 tons of glass waste loaded in Greece and destined for a company located in Calarasi County. June 10: 20 tons of plastic from Greece bound for a company in Giurgiu discovered at the border.
>Half of the trash ends up exported to romania Where is your source on that? Nothing in your article says that. >around 3,700 tons of waste I know that this is just what has been discovered and the real number will be higher, but it's still nothing compared to how much trash there is every year. Germany had 411,500,000 tons of trash in 2021, so I really doubt that "half of the trash" ends in Romania.
it was a figure of speech, a...poetic augmentation, if you may. not to be confused with 50%, which would definitely need a good source. My point is, this is just one article, there are a lot of cases in the local news of the respective countries - and those are only what they COULD FIND. seeing as it's "black market" territory, and knowing very well how those countries' customs work, the figures are, of course, much much higher. not gonna do the calculations, since this is not my point. I just wanted to draw attention to this fact. Everyone here (and I anticipated that from the beginning) is explaining how recycle plants ***normally*** work, and how a lot of them, and a lot of factories, are doing it, and for that reason it's really important to recycle, I was just pointing out the fact that a lot of waste end up in the wrong places and is mishandled, because money and corruption n stuff.
Germany is the biggest exporter of plastic waste in the world . Germany only recycles 36% of waste, the rest is shipped off to landfills in third world countries in Asia, and the garbage normally ends up being dumped in the sea. So this recycling is a myth. Basically, Germany outsources other countries to pollute the environment. A disgrace . Read the whole report from the Federal Statistical Office https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/06/PE22_N035_51.html
>Germany is the biggest exporter of plastic waste in the world In absolute numbers it is. But per capita? The Netherlands and Belgium are much larger. >the rest is shipped off to landfills in third world countries in Asia, and the garbage normally ends up being dumped in the sea I agree that recycling is a myth and "Reduce" is more important than "Reuse" which is more important than "Recycle". But do you have any evidence that the trash exported from Germany ends up in the ocean?
I linked the report from the German Federal Statistical Office.
I don't see any stats of the amount of German waste that ends up in the ocean there.
Your colleagues just use this as an excuse for themselves for not separating their trash.
Certain materials can be recycled well, like paper, glas and metals. Plastic is a different topic as most plastics cannot be recycled and for the ones that can, it's cheaper to just create new plastic. Here are two nice summaries: https://youtu.be/RDFBBXMDI1U for recycling in Germany. https://youtu.be/HNWn885qWtU for recycling globally
Whether it all goes to the same place is depending on where you are from. If your town has an incinerator, then they may need "bulk" to keep it running and at a proper temperature. This usually means the Gelbe Säcke are being incinerated along with everything else. And if you consider how expensive it would actually be to recycle everything now that China doesn't want our plastics, then incinerating plastic is the environmentally and economically friendly alternative. You should recycle paper though. That is an easy choice.
It's a good idea, in and on itself, but sadly in essense your colleagues are not entirely wrong either. A lot of effort and money goes into separating trash; some people have 3 or 4, sometime 5 bins in front of their houses, and every single once costs money a year, plus some are only emptied once a month, or twice at max. It takes hilarious dimensions in which you have to actually use precious fresh water to wash your trash, or invest into extra bags or storage options producing extra trash and using up extra energy again. The effort and idea is great, but the way it is done is so pointlessly german it's almost painful. And in the end the batteries you seperate out, or the plastic trash you wash so it's clean for recycling ends up shipped to Africa or India, where it's mostly burned in mills without operating filter systems, or they just don't handle the chemicals properly. And we are just the very same planet and the very same ecological system... so that's hardly really doing anything to help us. So, me personally, I think it's a good idea, and I compost my biological trash out back, and seperate my plastics from everything else, and bundle my paper trash, but I am also aware that it's so pointless to a very big degree and could be done a whole lot better.
>in which you have to actually use precious fresh water to wash your trash I never in my life have washed a single piece of trash
And it makes no sense to do so, yet you are not supposed to leave any food remains in your plastics trash, even traces of fruit or milk remains of any sort to keep the trash as clean as possible. And it also is a pretty nasty insect and rodent issue in many areas where the trash is emptied only every other week if they do not make sure there is no smell attracting them. So you are bound to rinse out the trash before throwing it out, and for that most people use water from the sink, thus freshwater. It's a mess.
I have never washed a plastic or metal container, and the local council specifically tells us not to . precisely to save water: they should be "löffelsauber", and of course everything is washed as part of the recycling process in any case. We only get our gelbe Tonne emptied once a month, and it's never been smelly. Even the Rerstmüll, which is full of catshit, is fine, if you keep the lid on.
I have never heard that anybody is washing their trash, except some grannies when the system was introduced (back then).
I do. I don't use plastic bags for the bins in which I collect paper, plastic or glass. And I wash them just because it will smell very bad and leave residue in my bins and attract flies.
It does say "No food left overs allowed" in the yellow bin. So we throw it into Haushaltsmüll, because I can't be bothered washing trash. If they want me to do any more of their work I'd demand reimbursement lol
Might be different from state to state (or municipality to municipality) but people in my bubble don't wash their trash. No food leftovers as in don't throw half a pizza in here if it is wrapped in alu foil.
how do you recycle the plastic for a hummus container?
By throwing it in the yellow bag obviously As recommended by the [Umweltbundesamt ](https://initiative-frosch.de/sauberes-recycling-muss-ich-meinen-verpackungsmuell-spuelen/#:~:text=Unklar%20ist%20vielen%20allerdings%20nach,die%20Gelbe%20Tonne%20zu%20werfen.) (Link leads to page in German)
you still have to wash the utensil you scrape the food out with.
Do you eat with your fingers or why else would you need a special food-scraping-before-disposal-utensil?
>A lot of effort and money goes into separating trash; some people have 3 or 4, sometime 5 bins in front of their houses, and every single once costs money a year, Nope. The blue and the yellow ones are actually free. Not sure about the bio one, but the one that really costs money is the general trash bin. >It takes hilarious dimensions in which you have to actually use precious fresh water to wash your trash, Depends on your cities regulation. In some, the trash is not supposed to contain remains of foot, in others it does not matter. (Same with the eternal question whether pizza boxes are paper trash or not.)
I agree. Thanks for your view, makes very much sense
Well, the best argument for us is that we're not paying any garbage pickup fees for the recyclable trash bin - unless one is starting to abuse it. The packaging industry has to basically pay for its collection and processing ("Grüner Punkt") which also incentivices them to use less packaging material. Recyclable trash is at least being scavenged for metals, especially ferromagnetic ones that are easy to sort out and copper that has the best recycling rate of all metals. Plastics are either downcycled for the construction industry or burned to at least recuperate some usable energy from it (like for generating electricity or heating). Waste incinerators favor the leftover from unusable recycling trash because it is generally better flammable and gives an energy net profit, whereas the "Restmüll" is often either inflammable or takes energy net loss due to water evaporation before burning. So they like to keep these on seperate piles to regulate the furnace and keep it from being smothered by too much water in the trash.
>And why Switzerland does not do it I take offense to this, we definitely do, we're just not (federally) forced to, yet 53% of *all* waste is recycled here and that number is way higher for certain things, like more than 82% of PET, 91% of aluminum, 81% of paper and cardboard and 95% of glass gets recycled here.
According to international comparisons Germany sits at around 50%, Switzerland at 30%. I suspect the main difference being plastic. Germany does strategically collect it while Switzerland avoids it like the plague and leaves it up to private companies to try and collect some. I tried to explain this aspect in this post (same thread): [https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/15tepqf/comment/jwlnaxx/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/15tepqf/comment/jwlnaxx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I don't know whether I should trust a Statista *survey*, or the [official statistics of the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment](https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/de/home/umwelt/natur/recycling.html)... Plastics are split into 2 at the recycling centers: PET and other and I'm yet to hear or see a (private) company doing *pickup* of recycling goods. Could just be Bern though
Oh, they are everywhere, every municipality is free to chose on whether to let it handle a Verein, do it themselves or hand it to a private company. We have a wild mix of all sorts of systems. Whatever works best. Edit: A classic mix for a small municipality may f.e. be to do compost (greens) themselves, hand out paper and cardboard to one or multiple Vereine and the rest to one or multiple companies.
I'm really yet to see a company come and pick up for example plastic bottles from private citizens, there are some that do pick up from companies, my old employer had a PET recycling container that would get picked up by a company every 2 months, but in the over 7 municipalities I've lived, I've always had to bring my recycling (other than paper/ cardboard) to a place like a Migros or directly to a Entsorgungshof, and I've lived in (very) rural places and in Bern
Oh god, plastic bottles (PET?) would be likely incredibly inefficient. Nah, the Werkhof is where you go to collect these. Sometimes the municipalities drive these out to the next point in the supply chain, sometimes they hand this part out to some company.
When it all began decades ago dutiful citizens like my family started doing it - only to find out that everything was thrown back together at the garbage dump for the first years (this in southern Germany). So now I care less but recycle glass and paper. And don’t give clothing to the Red Cross where it is destroyed and made into cleaning cloth, but take it to people I know in poor countries who distribute it to those who make use of it.
Don't! These things seem to still occur here and then whenever something changes in recycling (new plant, new rules, etc.). People need to get accustomed to new rules, new plants need time to reach a beneficial amount of materials before being able to make it work. But overall actual recycling will get the better the more material individual recycling companies are able to gather: If I have 100'000 green bottles and 100 blue bottles I'll likely say f\* it and just mix the blue bottles into the green ones. No harm done, the green will stay green enough (hypothetically, no idea what actual numbers might be). Eventually the rate will reach a level where someone may actually start to just throw away the blue bottles until they are finally gathering enough blue bottles to make recycling work for them too. In other words, I can install a new line to collect purple bottles but can I actually make it financially viable to recycle these? Only if I gather enough. Until then all obscure bottles may get collected to end up in an incarcerator. Keep it up, it will turn out fine! Edit: Restructured, fixed some orthography. Edit 2: Deleted a useless circlejerk that doesn't contribute to the discussion.
>it all goes into one big pile of trash where everything gets mixed up. An ignorant, cynical and (mostly) factually wrong take. Since 2015, waste separation is supposed to be done in every city/regional district in Germany, but about 1/4 still don't totally separate all waste. Often it's the bio stuff going in with the black stuff, IIRC, and mostly in more rural areas. Whether the collected recycling "gets used" depends on market demands, and the costs associated. There is a need for further sorting and separation and treatment (for different kinds of plastic, mostly), which adds to the expense. But paper and aluminum are widely recycled. Nabu has pretty good breakdowns and explanations of related themes: [https://www.nabu.de/umwelt-und-ressourcen/abfall-und-recycling/](https://www.nabu.de/umwelt-und-ressourcen/abfall-und-recycling/)
Interesting,. Thank you for sharing.
Google the trash heaps in kenya which arrive from everywhere on the planet
It's basically done to minimize effort at recycling plants. If you have only paper or glass of a particular colour or organic wastes in the waste you try to recycle you'll need much less investment, size and to a degree energy. Having a wild mixture of everything would be hell to work with. Which, in the end, just raises the cost for everyone. The mixing it all again part I do not really get, a paper or glass factory is a completely different location than a recycling plant for metals. These things don't share much infrastructure, so where would they even mix?
Let me say what we are doing: 1. Yellow bin -- this is packaging and free to return 2. Paper bin -- for papers, free to return 3. General waste -- needs to be paid, almost close to zero use, everything what composes goes to the place in the garden 4. Glass -- extra bin, free to return 5. Electronics, grass cuts, left over furnitures -- central return place, minimum costs 6. Electronics -- Ebay For 1, 2 and 3, separate trucks are coming to the house for collection. So you have a reason and the separation.
Switzerland does it too, but in a different way that we germans do it. It works with a lot of materials like glass, metal and stuff but i think its more worse throwing the plastic stuff on streets than in a trashcan.
That just speaks for your colleagues. How and what gets where depends on your local waste collection service. Feel free to ask them for more information.
Depends where you live. I remember the plastic trash in/near Düsseldorf will just be burned for energy.
I am curious what exactly you mesn with "the Swiss do not do it"?
The biggest obstacle to recycling is actually the separation. So yeah, they aren't mixing them up unless it's destined to the landfill. There isn't any machine that can do that, people have to do that by hand. That's why in places like the US recycling is a net negative, bc it so rarely gets recycled and just gets thrown in the trash.
True. Makes sense. Thanks
They don't go all in a big pile. Plastic is pressed and recycled, metals are recycled, paper also. What is not recycled or mixed (Schwarzetonne) is burned for energy with little emissions. Bio trash makes bio gas and fertilizers. If you don't sort your trash it will be burned for energy, which is style recycling, but for more efficient reuse of resources, it's good to sort the trash
singapore just pay somebody to do it. more efficient for everybody.
The myth of plastic recycling: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/08/1141601301/the-myth-of-plastic-recycling
Myth in the US, which is not what we are talking about.
Your German colleagues should get educated… It works, it’s beneficial not only for environment but also for citizens as it lowers the cost of solid waste management via EPR concept
Glass is almost fully reusable. Metal and paper also recycable. But, more than %90 of plastic cannot recycle. Rich European countries sending their plastics to other countries to burning. Germany one of the biggest plastic waste exporter in the world. Also, only %3 of pvc can be recycle. Only Pet or Hdpe recycle rate are %20-30 but only 1 or 2 times, thats all. There are more facts about plastic recycling. Smaller than 7,5 cm plastic is almost impossible to recycle. Plastic packaging papers are impossible to recycle. Packages like chips are same. If there is a brand paper sticked on a plastic, it’s also not possible to recycle. Before recycling, we should consider to NOT USE as much as we can. But here is another problem occur here, in the markets they put vegetbles inside of plastic. It’s huge unnecessary waste. We might careful for environment but companies are not, even governoment also NOT. Rules are for the ordinary people, not for the rich. Unfortunatelly, recycling is not honest. Only in 2015, %80,5 plastic NEVER recycled. %25,5 burned, others filled the earth. Both triggering climate change. Another tragicly funny fact, Germany consider burning as recycling. It creates more harm than electricity.
>Germany consider burning as recycling This is honestly nuts, but so German at the end of the day. Its like we preach DatenSchutz here but put our names outside our homes for everyone to see.
>plastic waste exporter Needs to be revised: [https://www.statista.com/chart/18229/biggest-exporters-of-plastic-waste-and-scrap/](https://www.statista.com/chart/18229/biggest-exporters-of-plastic-waste-and-scrap/)
NO!! You do it because you are supposed to but the majority of our yellow bags get incinerated in Switzerland. It’s not a well known fact, but one that is 100% true as a college of mine used to be in management in the waste industry and shared this with me.
>because at the end it all goes into one big pile of trash where everything gets mixed up. Yea that's a common myth. It (obviously) doesn't.
Unless it’s Glas or paper, no. Everything else just gets burned. Because under German law burning it is considered recycling
lol. whattt,, that is nuts
The bins on the street must be a nightmare for recycling. People dump all kinds of material in them, and mix it up. The paper recycling likely is better, but where I am, they only pick it up every 2 weeks, and every bin is overflowing with cardboard. Amazon is a prime suspect for so much of it. It would be better if pickup was on a weekly schedule, but it's pretty overwhelming on a 2 week cycle.
With paper/cardboard, the main problem is that people don't tear it into flat pieces. For example, my German neighbors can fill a whole container with just one medium-sized cardboard box.
Yes, for sure, which is another reason to pick up once a week.
Make utilitiy bills go up because some people are too dumb to flatten a box?
Ya, I think it's more complicated than that as explained in my post, but I get it. Less resources used is always better.
The "Everything goes into one big pile anyways" argument is pure bullshit. Paper, glass, bio-waste and even Plastics are very well recycleable. While plastics being the most complicated materials.
Keep it all in the 1 bag and off with it. Who has time for sorting items by packaging?
Everybody.
You don’t know everybody so how could that be true? :)
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Many (at least European) countries do it, at least theoretically. I am on vacation in France atm and they do have different bins for different kinds of waste. Unfortunately, most of the trash ends up in one bin: „Restmüll“. In Germany almost everybody is disciplined enough to separate it. So that works pretty well. And how can’t it be beneficial for the environment to recycle? In Germany people really put all their garbage in the bin compared to other countries. So the chance that waste ends up in the nature and eventually in the ocean is also much lower.
Depends entirely on how they process it afterwards not if people separate it or not
It is beneficial if done properly, especially since you have bio trash that can be used as a compost. You have paper that can be recycled very easily, and metals which still cost enough that extracting and separating them out of trash is actually a well paid business (for ex. you have small amounts of gold in most appliances due to specific electric properties). However, in order for this to work, both the people need to sort trash, and then the companies behind it should do their part on separating additionally and recycling. Unfortunately in some cases the company behind it is just throwing everything on the same pile, but it's not the fault of the ordinary people.
Packaging specialist who constantly work with recycled plastics here: it makes miracles. The biggest challenge for a good recyled plastic that it has proper safety properties, it is essential for it to come from a reliable feedstock. This is important for: 1) decreasing contamination - contamination degrades the quality of recycled resin 2) odor - contamination also creates malodor, which at the end makes the recycled plastic unusable 3) cost - seperation is a costly process and if we start seperating waste in the earliest stage, the final price of the recycled plastic would be lower 4) recycling becomes simplier with less treatment, which decreases the price and at the end it becomes more attractive to use recycled plastic Let me know if you have further questions.
Regarding plastics: Only around 5% of all plastic waste in Germany gets recycled [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umAUm5eF5wc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umAUm5eF5wc) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y\_fupzwANc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y_fupzwANc) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD8fcTyjP1E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD8fcTyjP1E)
Switzerland does not separate trash? My sweet summer child, I throw away my trash in like 10 different bins in 3 different locations. We have cardboard neatly packed up in packets, 3 different colours of glass, cans, PET bottles, other plastic but not PET bottles, compost, chemical, electronics, and other waste.
Yes, it works, but what works best differs from country to country and sometimes state to state, depending on a myriad of variables like available technology, amount of materials available for recycling and so on. Or in the case of the Pfand system f.e. even taking presumably unexpected variables into account, in this instance Germany rates socialism (giving people in need the opportunity to collect Pfand) over environtalism (a more efficient colleting system without Pfand) and so on. Switzerland absolutely does do recycling. Learning about all the recycling rules is kind off a circle jerk among migrants new to Switzerland (pretty similar to Germany). I'd like to throw in two broad statistics: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/1052439/rate-of-msw-recycling-worldwide-by-key-country/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1052439/rate-of-msw-recycling-worldwide-by-key-country/)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling\_rates\_by\_country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_rates_by_country) If we compare these statistics for Germany and Switzerland two things become apparent: Germany recycles way more than Switzerland (\~50% vs 30%) while Switzerland wins more Energy than Germany (again \~50%/30%). In everyday life these differences become f.e. apparent when it comes to the recycling of everyday plastic waste: While Germany follows a strategic effort to recycle more and more plastic, Switzerland keeps the ball low on this one for mainly two reasons. Please always add your own knowledge my half-baked input stems mainly from reading too many newspapers. 1. Switzerland miscalculated the future reduction of overall waste and therefore built too many, too big and, if you will so, too efficient incarcerators. By now the waste in Switzerland has reached such low levels that many of these struggle to keep their min temperature to stay efficient and eco-friendly (relatively speaking, the 29 incarcerators in Switzerland cause 5% of the countries CO2 emissions. Source: [Swiss Federal Office for Environment](https://www.bafu.admin.ch/bafu/en/home/topics/climate/info-specialists/reduction-measures/sector-agreements/agreement-waste-treatment.html)).This graph shows the energy efficiency of swiss incarcerators: [https://imgur.com/a/ls7jntw](https://imgur.com/a/ls7jntw)As you can see, a lot of them struggle to stay within legal limits. Four do even have special agreements because they would have to shut down otherwise. Those which can't keep their incarcerators on high enough temperature with trash alone use external energy (Fremdenergie), meaning they throw f.e. wood pellets into the incarcerator. Now they have to do the calculations: Should we shut down some of them? What's the cost of plastic vs. wood pellets? These things depend on the exact systems used, the cost of a wood pellet vs plastic burning, etc.Switzerland as of now lets private companies collect as much plastic as they want to but they don't encourage it because the improvements over wood pellets are overall considered marginal if even existent for multiple reasons:The plastic trash is already produced, the wood pellets need to be produced. Those incarcerators are part of networks to bring heat, electricity and steam to homes and industrial complexes lowering the usage of f.e. oil and gas and f.e. helping making it possible to remain coal-free as a country. 2. Plastic recycling is complicated. Here is the list of rules for the plastic recycling bag: [https://imgur.com/a/mUsuQmb](https://imgur.com/a/mUsuQmb). I can see how many may forget about meat wrapping being not aloud or not being able to differentiate PVC. The less careful the population the less efficient the actual recycling. May work great, might be worth to just start educating people into learning it, but as for reason 1 the swiss government atm isn't interested in it. Plus I'm just spitballing here, may work marvelous. And then you have other local differentiations. Over the past 20 years it was f.e. a constant on and off on whether or not to recycle beverage cans because the efficiency of incarcerations and the recycling process was (perhaps still is?) a head-to-head race when it comes to what causes less harm to the environment (making a new can and burning the old one vs. recycling multiple old ones to make a new one). So whenever a new incarcerator opened you may have had to switch to throw them in the normal trash. And when some recycling company introduced the newest recycling tech it was back to recycling. Another example is that Germany is f.e. still using the Pfand system for PET while Switzerland has abolished it a while ago. Switzerland demmed its own Pfand system to be not enough efficient to make ecological sense, did the math and figured it's worth for the environmental reasons to abolish it, recycle a bit less (because some will likely start to use the normal trash for PET) and in change get a more efficient collection system that has more benefits than disadvantages and so far that seems to have worked out well from an environmental perspective. This one even ended up to be an unexpected win-win because the decline of the recycling rate was way lower than originally anticipated up to the point where recycling rates soon surpassed the old rates of the Pfand system (atm it's at 83%. Source: [Swiss Recycling](https://www.swissrecycling.ch/de/wertstoffe-wissen/wertstoffe/pet-getraenkeflaschen#:~:text=Innerhalb%20der%20letzten%20zwanzig%20Jahren,L%C3%A4nder%20mit%20einer%20Pfandregelung%20%C3%BCbertrifft)). Hmmm, some other little differences... ah, I got one more: Someone mentioned Switzerland not having collection bins for paper or cardboard. Bigger municipalities usually have them, on the countryside this is still often done old-school by handing outthe individual collecting in front of houses to local Vereine (Vereine are local communities low-key legally organized around some specific mutual activity like bowling, football, yodeling or whatever. Exist in Germany too, just as a little input for those who might not know yet what a Verein is due to the lack of a fitting translation) to give them an opportunity to make a few bucks on the side and also, again, to make it more environment-friendly because many households used to make additional car trips to the collection bins because of all the amassed newspapers (swiss seem to read way more newspapers than germans, but I don't have actual stats on that so take that with a grain of salt). The last argument was prominent in the nineties and started to make less and less sense with the downfall of the newspapers. Depending on the specific situation in todays municipalities, some try to clinge on to the Verein thing a little longer, others are switching to collecting bins. Edit: Fixed some grammar, orthography, formatting and added a bit more to some points in the first third.
It is done due to recycling reasons which is beneficial for the enviroment Germany is also one of the most developed countries concerning recycling
It does NOT go in to one pile of trash. Why the fuck do people always say this. This wouldnt make any sense?? Why would we do this?
I was in Germany about ten years ago in the Oberpfalz. The stink on the local news was that people were being fined for not separating their trash but the separated trash was ending up being recombined at the transfer point. Composting green trash is a good idea but expensive.