Bin night is pretty simple here in Australia with two, three or maybe four bins to separate rubbish into. Spare a thought then for the people living in Germany where rubbish has to be sorted into up to 20 different bins. And with hundreds of humorous skits posted online
by foreigners showing the trouble caused by using the wrong bin, it seems the process is taken very seriously.
“Recycling in Germany is more complicated than you might think,” reads the line on one video.
In it a man arrives in the bin area of his apartment complex and scratches his head as he’s faced with dozens of different coloured bins.
“I’ll guess I’ll just put it in this one,” he says, dumping his bag inside one until someone chases out behind him listing very quickly how he has to put certain things in the blue bin, others in the white and so on. He’s also reminded there’s no glass bottle recycling allowed in Germany on Sunday because it’s too noisy.
But despite its potential for neighbourhood recycling wars, the German attitude clearly works. The nation tops the chart for the highest recycling rate in the world with 66.1 per cent of its waste recycled, while in Australia it’s around half.
Germany is so good at recycling, it has even found a use for dead animals. Hunters can drop their deer heads at the tip and they’ll be rendered down for fat which can be used in products like lip balm.
For foreigners, the process starts as a daunting prospect, but one that most seem to embrace.
A newbie to Germany, Kevin McFall talks through how it works in his area on a YouTube video. He jokes that he’s had to become a “master recycler” to become fully German and with the amount of thought that goes into his rubbish separation he’s not wrong.
Mr McFall explains how his rubbish is separated into paper and cardboard and that there are three different bins for plastic.
One takes the mixed plastic packaging which includes things like fruit containers and chip wrappers; another is for PE or stretchy plastic like in plastic bags; and a third is for plastic bottles.
Even within plastic bottles there is a subsection and some of these are suitable for the deposit system. Like with Australia’s container deposit scheme, recyclers can take them to a special machine and receive money back for each bottle.
Some glass bottles can be taken to the deposit system machines too, but others are separated further, this time by colour.
Clear glass jars go in the white glass bin, green goes in the green glass bin and brown in another one.
“So Kevin’s not even done yet. There’s like … nine more categories,” his wife Sara suddenly jumps in. “I didn’t even know it was this involved. I’m standing behind the camera laughing!”
Undeterred, Mr McFall continues explaining how Tetrapaks go in their own separate bin, as do cans and aluminium like yoghurt lids and chip containers such as the ones Pringles come in.
Next up is batteries, various types of styrofoam and food waste which all have their own bins. Finally there’s residual waste, which is everything else.
“In the last 35 years, Germany has cut in half the amount of trash that goes in the residual waste because of all the recycling … so that’s pretty amazing,” Mr McFall said, adding that he’s proud to be part of the solution.
While this is about as extreme as it gets in Germany and Mr McFall has to travel to the tip for many of these specialised bins, other parts of the country still have at least six bins.
There are also financial incentives for households to produce less rubbish. German households are charged a collection fee based on the size of their bin and frequency of pick-up, but there’s no limit on free recycling.
Rates vary in different cities but in the town with the highest rates of recycling, the most popular option is a 60-litre bin – half the size of the average Australian wheelie bin – collected fortnightly for about $11.
Over the past 30 years recycling has become part of life for German residents.
“I remember when that ‘Recyclemania’ started in the late ’80s, early ’90s, and as a kid, I found it exciting,” one man commented on Mr McFall’s video. “Now it feels absolutely normal to recycle my trash.”
Emma Levett is a freelance writer