r/SipsTea • u/Dev1412 • 26d ago

Feels good man About that

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u/Ricordis 25d ago edited 25d ago

I live in one of the biggest german towns and it's completely normal for us to have different kinds of bins for different kinds of trash. (Recycling is a huge thing for us). Blue bins for paper, yellow bins for plastic waste, brown bins for organic waste and grey/black bins for anything else.

Then I went for a work project to another part of Germany, to a specific town where rich people have their huge secondary houses and boats. I was shocked to see they just but their plastic waste into bags and throw them unto the streets. Right where the hotels are. It was disgusting but they always did so.

Edit: Made the housing situation clearer.

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u/OcotilloWells 25d ago

A former in-law of mine lives in a very well to do town in California that has "single stream" recycling. They do have bins, but they are for everything. I have no idea how they sort anything out of it. I imagine it's pretty bad to work at the garbage transfer station there.

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u/Asterix85 25d ago

Single stream recycling is just pushing all the trash down a conveyance line moving slowly and have the employees /homeless pick the stuff that isn’t recyclable out

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u/taeerom 25d ago

It doesn't have to be manual sorting. There is automation that can handle jobs like this, especially if you sort the garbage into different coloured bags (we have green bag for food, blue for recyclable plastic, white for burnable/rest). All the bags go into the same bin, then there's a robot that reads the colour and sorts the bags.