Ask Lemmy

We (Delft, NL) have underground containers. You drop your trashbag through the hole and there is a sensor that detect when the container is full. At that moment the municipality comes to empty it. I like that I don't have to store my trash in my appartment but can just drop it in the container whenever. But, the place when the containers are can get messy when they are full and neighbours are too lazy to walk the 200m to the next container and place their bag next to it instead, where seagulls rip it open.

The containers are HUGE. Sometimes the fire dept. rescues things like wedding rings from them. Also, there are several different kinds to split kinds of waste - paper, glass, textiles, plastics, residual and maybe some more i never use.

For bigger items or things like chemicals there is also a "milieustraat", where you can drive into and the guys there tell you where to put your stuff.

Still for me this is the best option I can think of.

It's a bit of a shit show in Australia.

Each city is responsible for it's own waste management. Mine has 3x channels: green waste for biodegradable anything, recyclables, and everything else.

The recyclables are a furphy though because, you can put anything plastic or paper in them, but ofc it's really only the PET plastic and the cardboard that actually gets recycled - the rest just goes to land fill.

We have a separate system for specific PET bottles vendors charge $0.10 per bottle, and you can return the bottles to a collection place to get that back.

We did have a separate system for soft plastics like plastic bags or whatever but that pretty much just wasn't viable.

Rant triggered: we've aparently stopped single use plastics like takeaway boxes, plastic bags, and plastic cuttlery, but IMO that's really just a fig leaf for companies that ship products in plastic packaging. It really shits me.

Additional rant: producers of plastic products like garbage bags have started this bullshit "ocean plastics" thing. They claim 50% or whatever of their bullshit bags are made from "ocean plastic" which they define as recycled plastic obtained from any community within 50km of the ocean (the vaaaast majority of Australians) which has no other plastic collection program. So basically... they charge city councils to disappear their plastic waste and then charge idiots to buy their "ocean plastic" garbage bags.

I have two bins. One black one for general trash and a county provided yellow bin for all recycling. Once a week, they come to curbside collect what you leave out. You are also allowed one "large" item per week of really any size. Threw out an old queensized boxspring once. Yard waste can be left in brown paper landscaping bags too once a week which has been really nice. Other places I've lived, it was a quarterly collection for yard waste. Any bulk metal collection must be scheduled or brought to the county dump directly.

US deep south. There is no recycling... everything just goes into a landfill. It's fucking stupid.

I live in an unincorporated area of the county, where trash collection isn’t mandated by law. The county has a contract with a private trash company, I get mailed a punchcard that allows me to dump 52 carloads of household trash, free of charge, at a nearby private waste transfer facility, a large warehouse where trash compactor trucks dump their loads for reloading into larger articulated trucks for hauling to a landfill. I back my car into a truck bay, and toss the trash onto the warehouse floor, where a frontloader moves it around and crushes it. There are also large bins to toss segregated recyclables into.

My neighborhood also has trash collection. We have a mutual service company, which predates the concept of a homeowner’s association. Every household owns a share in the company, for which we have to pay our share of the company’s operating costs each year, and elect board members to run the company. The company was founded to provide water, and has expanded its service over the years to provide sewer, road paving and snow plowing, and weekly trash collection. Unlike a HOA, the company has no control over our properties. The company owns a baby trash compactor truck built on a pickup truck chassis, which collects trash on Mondays and mixed recycling on Tuesdays, and hauls it to the nearby waste transfer facility, where they pay to dump.

I burn my paper waste in my fireplace, and compost my food waste in my former cesspit. There is a bear that visits my neighborhood Monday mornings to raid trash cans and browse my compost pit.

Sounds a lot like Japan. There's colored bags that you can buy at the store for "combustible" and not waste. Then there's metal and glass pickup, small yard waste (mostly twigs), electronics, paper, and certain plastic has a dropoff. I've never heard of trash police issuing fines, but they'll leave your items behind if it's the wrong day or type.

When I lived in the US it was just two bins - trash (which was really anything you can fit in a bag, nobody checks) and recycling. Recycling varied by municipality but it was mostly single-stream glass, metal, and most plastics. Things like plastic bags and Styrofoam couldn't go in the recycling but most places like the grocer would take bags or fluorescent bulbs or batteries.

Of course, multiple studies have shown that most plastics just end up burned or in the ocean so guess it doesn't much matter how they are collected...

@zlatiah we have weekdays for diferent trash..

Common monday and thurdsday
Glass tuesday
Paper wednesday
Plastic friday

We just put the trash outside in bags or in our trashcan at night and its collected in the morning

Germany here. There are some smaller differences by state.

Some states collect biological waste separately, while others collect it as general house trash.

Packaging trash is paid for by the producers beforehand, then people collect the packaging (most often plastics, making many people think we're collecting plastics in it), depending on state, either in yellow bags or yellow trash bins. Every two weeks, people put their bags next to the street, and a collection truck goes through and collects them. The person responsible for it is often based on house rules (contracted out, or a rotating inhabitant flat list). Plastics get recycled, to some degree. Some of it goes into burning, so the burning processing plant has enough burnable material.

Paper is collected separately from house trash, too, and collected at intervals. Multi-tenant housing often has shared bins, because there's no or little cost associated to the bins.

"House trash" is collected in bins. Every two weeks collected (placed next to the street, same stuff as above). Some multi-tenant housing can have per-flat bins. Depending on their size, they cost a different fixed monthly fee. Where I live there's 24 individual bins, every one in its own labeled compartment, some with a lock. Every two weeks, everyone moves their own bin next to the street and then back the next day (or later, depending on diligence and being away). For most of Germany, the trash gets burned.

Every seller of batteries has to accept/collect used batteries. Typically, supermarkets have small boxes at the entrance or exit.

Twice a year you can put bigger stuff like furniture next to the street. Some people will go through the streets and look or take what they can use. A truck collects them as trash.

Following some plan or schedule, but not particularly regularly, there's a moving collection point for small special waste. Like eletronics, fat, chemicals, etc. For the regular people. This is especially for people who can't drive the stuff off by themselves.

You collect electronic waste and drive to a communal collection point, for free. Communal or region collection points have various types of waste they collect for free, and also some types of trash and bigger or commercial trash dumping costs money (like construction and demolition waste, soil, special kinds of waste).

Bottles and drinking cans are either single-use or multi-use. You pay a deposit and when you bring them back you get it back. All single use bottles and cans use a common system, with an image code printed on it, and every seller of them has to collect them no matter where they come from specifically. So as a consumer you can bring them to any supermarket. As a supermarket, you participate in a centralized system that shifts and receives and pays the deposit/payout money as necessary.

Human waste gets flushed away, moves through the sewers, and gets collected and processed in sewage plants.

For restaurants with fat waste, for example, there are businesses that handle the collection and adequate waste handling.

Simple glass, like glass bottles, not like windows, you collect and then bring to one of many collection containers in your neighborhood. They're separated by white, green, and brown glass. They get recycled.

Clothes you bring to collection containers somewhere in your neighborhood or district.

Man, this became a long text. It's quite the intricate system.

I can see in the shared bins how careless and space-wasteful some people are, butting full boxes in their original shape in there, while I always cut them up, taking up minimal space. I don't think shared bins for costly trash would work.

The separation of packaging materials from general house waste can be somewhat of a hassle. I wonder how feasible automated sorting would be. Switzerland does it like that. I feel like it's mostly because automated sorting was not as feasible when the system was introduced, and then it was an established system. It may also have to do with the calculation of the cost for the companies paying the packaging waste cost.

/edit: Added bolding to make the text more accessible/scan-able.

Here we have colour and symbol coded trash bins :3. Blue with a square is paper, green with a circle is glass, yellow with a triangle is plastic, sometimes there's also one for fabrics/clothes. Houses generally have smaller trash bins with wheels, apartments have either bigger standalone containers, or underground ones. I think most of the recycling here happens through the bottle/can return machines at stores tho

2 x 240L wheelie bins - one for dry mixed recycling, the other for residual waste. They are collected on alternating weeks.

We could pay for a third for green waste, but we compost instead (and have a bokashi bin to assist with that).

There are a few communal glass bins around which we will drop stuff off to as we pass from time to time, since that is not included in the DMR selection.

Soft plastics - bags, film etc - are also not included, but can be recycled at supermarkets - or collected by them when they make a home delivery (which is what we do).

Tetrapaks, WEEE, batteries etc need to be taken to the local recycling centre. We'll book a slot about once a quarter for that.

My council (in the UK the rules vary between coincils) just has two bins. We have a black lidded wheelie bin for general household rubbish that is collected every week and a red lidded bin for most recycleables (glass, plastic, paper cardboard) collected every two weeks but it has restrictions on things like plastic film. If you are found to break the rules (open lids, wrong items in bin) they may refuse collection and leave a note saying why it won't be collected. For example the black lidded general waste bin stipulates that all your rubbish must be inside refuse sacks, if you just have loose rubbish they won't collect it.

You just make sure the bin is accessible/near the road on collection day and it gets picked up. Bins get lifted and tipped into the bin lorry then they put the bins back.

You can also leave a plastic bag on the floor next to the bin for disposal of 'small electricals' (chargers, dead electronics etc.).

Bins are provided by the council and collection is paid by your council tax. Both bins are 140 litres but you can ask for a 240l if you have a bigger family producing more waste.

You can pay an extra charge (I think about £80 per year) for a 'green bin' and associated collection which is for disposal of plant waste (i.e. if you have a decent sized garden and maintain it).

And finally if you have too much rubbish or items that can't be easily disposed of (oil, large electronic items, diy waste) you can fill your car and take it to the local 'tip' (normally named something like waste management centres etc.) where you can get rid of it all.

USA, Virginia: My county does not have municipal trash collection, so we either haul our own trash to convenience centers, or pay a private service to pick it up. The landfill and convenience centers are run by a private company and it seems to work pretty well, except for recycling. The county only recycles paper/carboard, metal, and #1 and #2 plastic, and for #2 plastic the opening of the container must be narrower than the container. We don't recycle glass or any other plastics. Apparently my neanderthal neighbors couldn't be arsed to rinse out the containers and the people whose job it was to sort it out refused to accept any more recycling from us until we made changes. And most of the county still just tosses everything in the trash compactors. I think our county-wide recycling rate is just under 25%.

I like the system better than when I lived in a city where we had trash pickup. I can go drop off when I need to instead of missing trash day, having trash pile up waiting for trash day, or having it not picked up because it was "too heavy," or some other reason. It doesn't cost me anything other than gas, and we can usually combine the drop off with grocery shopping or other errands. I just wish we were better at recycling. My daughter lives in a city with single-stream recycling - all the trash and recycling goes in the same container and it gets automatically sorted at a processing facility.

Two Words: Parker Piles

(Philadelphians will get what I'm saying)

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(images obtained from the internet)

USA, Southeast. In general, you have 1 trashcan for trash and 1 recycling bin for everything that could potentially be recycled. Sometimes it's just one can for 'combined recycling' though. And if you're in an apartment, it's usually all just one big dumpster. A service comes around once a week to collect those.

If recycling is being done, the load gets dumped through an automatic waste separator (a building sized conveyor belt with machines that separate items by density). They find all the metal & recycle that. Particularly nice services will also grab the cardboard/paper. But none of them can really separate the different types of plastic from each other, so all of that goes to the landfill.

Interesting to me, the most poor/rural areas appear to be the best at recycling, as for them you must bring your trash to a transfer station yourself. And those stations have voluntary bins for each of the recycling waste streams. So if you care enough to separate your plastic into the different types (we number them 1 - 7), there's a bin for that.

I live in America I just have a giant dumpster that everyone in my complex uses for anything and everything, we have no recycling programs here and the so called recycling parts you can do to recycle all go.to the landfill also.

I don't know how richer people in houses have to do with them, but they got 2 bins one for "recycling" and one for everything else. Don't know if they need to pay for them though. But yet 90% of the recycling goes to landfill anyways.

Most parts of my country have a similar system as yours, and I don't like it. One is saving up bags for an entire week until trash day. There are calls to make it one every 2 weeks, which won't be fun in summer.

Luckily the place I'm moving to next year will have a big underground container so at all times of the day or night I can go deposit the trash there, and then they can collect the container whenever it suits them. Seems much better.

Where i live the garbage man just drives past without stopping while everyone stands on the side of the road with their trash and then then tries to throw it in the back as he passes. He goes very slow though.

We have a blue bin for recyclables, a green bin for organics, and a trash can for non-recyclables. Leaf and yard trimmings are put in a bag or tied into a pile.

We put trash in a colored bin on the street and it's picked up once a week. There is no recycling pickup. The last town we lived in picked up recycling (and leaves, in the fall), so it's disappointing. If we need brush, chemicals, or anything too large to fit in the bin removed, we have to request it by phone or online.

Three bins, Trash, Recycling, Yard Debris.

Recycling and Yard get picked up every week.

Trash is every other week.

Frankly, I wish trash was weekly too!

There are some little organisations like Pedal People that collect and dispose of waste via bicycle. I don't have something like this in my area, but it'd be nice.

we have separate sorting bins for plastic, paper, metal, cardboard, compostables, newspapers, clear glass, dark glass, batteries, lamps, and "household waste". bottles and cans go back to the store for credit. other stuff like oils, chemicals, electronics, wood, and appliances goes to a bigger recycling facility outside of town.

it works fairly well. we don't really have landfills anymore. the biggest problem is people not giving a shit if the receptacles are full and either cramming their shit in or just leaving it outside.

It's a pretty good simple system here. You have two wheely bins, one red lid for rubbish and the other yellow lid for non glass recycling, and you have a much smaller bin for the glass. Rubbish goes out every week, recycling goes out every other week, and the specific day depends on your suburb (mine is Monday). You just leave your bin on the side of the road the night before your rubbish day, and bring your bin back once the rubbish truck has been past.

In Thailand (and Vietnam, Philippines) where I often live plastic recycling is basically non existent and I think it's a good thing, let me explain.

The value of plastic and recyclability is really low but exposure overhead is massive (thrash being lost to ocean etc) and after visiting a trash burning facility myself I'm completely converted to trash burning. On paper plastic recycling make sense but it so low value with absurdly high overhead - just getting plastic straight to the incinerator as fast as we can is the best thing we can do imo.

As for other materials like aluminum it's very recycled everywhere I've been as it pays very decent money.

Germany.
It's slightly different in every county, but generally the county has the responsibility to pick up household trash, and contracts it out to a private company.
They pay the company and charge a fee per bin from the home owners to get the money back. The homeowner collects the fee from renters.
The bins are all a standard size, but some towns offer bins with an inlay that reduces capacity for a lower fee, to encourage reducing the amount of trash you produce.
Additionally, there are bins for paper/cardboard, glass, and plant matter, which cost no fee, and one for plastics where the fee is charged to the manufacturer of the product containing plastics.
4 times a year you can schedule a special pickup for items that are too big to fit in the bins, furniture, etc. Often, if you put that stuff on the curb in the evening, only half of it will be left by the time it's picked up in the morning, cause people will load everything that can still be used or fixed into their white panel van and sell it in Eastern Europe.
Every store selling electronics has to take back electronics waste and batteries for free, by law.
Everything else has to be dropped off at a recycling center and the cost is charged to you directly by type and weight.
The system is pretty decent IMO.

Ireland

It's privatized so we pay monthly based on weight and a standing charge.

3 wheelie bins, one black for general rubbish, one green for recyclables, one brown for compost. Our collection is weekly for black bin and alternate the other bins every week.

Recycling is clean dry waste including paper, plastic, tins. Glass is brought separately yourself to bottle bins and sorted by colour. Usually there are charity run bins for old clothes there too.

We have a return system for plastic and cans too which are at supermarkets usually and you get your deposit back, 15c for small stuff, 25c for larger.

All this means we have in the kitchen... 1 rubbish bin, 1 recycling bin, 1 compost bin, 3 large bags for bottles by colour, 1 large back for return stuff. And it's not a big space, it's a real pain.

So, in the apartment complex I live in, US, we have 2 dumpsters where everyone dumps basically anything and everything, regardless of whether it should be recycled or whatever else. I'm personally not the biggest fan of that, but what can you do when even basically all the maintenance people have stopped working here, telling you how it's run here?

I personally hate it because they don't get emptied frequently enough that it will absolutely overflow from lazy people of all types not wanting to throw their trash into the back half of the damn dumpsters! And don't even get me started on people not breaking down boxes, which is something your supposed to do, even though it's not enforced. Wouldn't mind if they did enforce it somehow, though.

Thrash can and recycling bin. Everything is mixed in the bin so I expect most of it is sent to a third world country or ends up on a landfill anyways.

Recycling is a lie.