Recyling in Germany

One of the things we discovered when we moved into our house is that the Germans really like to recyle.  It fits right in with other European values like small cars, efficient appliances, and public smoking.  Well, maybe not public smoking.

We have four bins for our family's waste products -- one for paper products (Altpapier -- "wastepaper"), one for packaging (Verpackungen -- wax-coated milk cartons, ziploc bags, saran wrap, styrofoam packaging, plastic, etc), one for products that can be composted (simply called "Bio" -- the brown bucket), and then the gray bucket for all other household trash.

The Bio is collected every week.  The rest are biweekly (every other week).  I initially thought that the "everything else" bucket wouldn't be big enough for us since our garbage collection in Maryland was semiweekly (twice a week).  I guess what I have discovered is that in Maryland, we would take the trash out twice a week whether it really needed to go out or not.  Now we only take the trash out when it really needs to go out.  And of course, the fact that we are recycling a lot also means less garbage overall.  We did a fair amount of recycling in the States, but we also threw away a number of recyclable items because Anne Arundel County wasn't able to process them.  That doesn't seem to be the case here -- the Germans recycle everything that can be recycled.  The result of all of this is we don't have as much garbage as we used to.  We could probably go three weeks between pickups and be fine.

Notice that none of our buckets take glass.  We have large bins for glass recycling a few hundred feet from our house.  There are separate bins for white glass, green glass, and brown glass.  These glass recycling bins are shared with everybody in the neighborhood.  Because recycling glass is noisy, this is only allowed between 8AM and 1PM and between 3PM and 8PM.  Of course, glass recycling is prohibited on Sundays and holidays (but you didn't need me to tell you that, right?).  If you were not aware, Germany has federally-mandated "quiet hours" from 1PM to 3PM every day and all day on Sundays and holidays.  You aren't supposed to mow your lawn, wash your car, or do things that might disturb your (presumably slumbering) neighbors during these times.