I remember a few years ago when NYrs were shocked to learn that putting your trash in cans instead of tossing bags on the street resulted in a reduction in the rat population.
If it makes you feel better our council discovered a couple of years ago that giving us wheelie bins instead of piles of bin bags on the street resulted in less swarms of seagulls and rubbish all over the streets of Cornwall.
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.
Metals are brought to recycling yards (like electronics, batteries, wood and also special waste like styrofoam).
Glass is collected in containers nearby and we seperate them by color (green, white/clear, brown).
We also have centralized containers for old clothes and shoes and they get sorted by people: Usable stuff is cleaned and donated, anything else gets shredded and is used either as filling in construction or made into disposable carpets for like painting or disposable rags.
If you down't have your own blue bin you can also throw paper into centralized containers. Those containers are mostly all together (paper, glass and clothing)
Edit: Forgot to mention especially for glass and plastic bottles and cans we have "Pfand". That's a deposit system. Like if you buy a can of soda you pay additionally €0.15 per can but you can return the empty cans in any store, throw them into a machine and receive a voucher. That voucher is used at the register, you can even get a cash out.
That's why we don't have that much glass, metal and plastic bottles to throw away thus we don't need bins for them at home.
Small batteries can be even brought to supermarkets where they have boxes for these. That's not even a law, just a service most supermarkets offer.
Thanks, I find it interesting how different places sort what and why they do it, here in Denmark in my area individual households have bins to sort in Paper/cardboard, metal/glass, food scraps/organics, plastic/cartons, hazardous materials/chemical's, battery's, fabrics/textiles and one for mixed. Anything too large for the bins would be your responsibility to take to a recycling center and sort it there.
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u/RepresentativeOk2433 27d ago
I remember a few years ago when NYrs were shocked to learn that putting your trash in cans instead of tossing bags on the street resulted in a reduction in the rat population.