German Trash Day

I was concerned about the disposal of trash since I had been told recycling and garbage is very complicated, and accurate recycling is compulsory. I had allowed my garbage to collect for a couple of weeks because they only pick up once every two weeks and certain recycling is picked up one Friday and other recycling and garbage on the alternate Friday. I was also concerned about leaving the garbage outside for animals to get into. However, that was an unnecessary concern since there are not as many animals that would get into the trash in Germany. In the grocery store, there are vending type machine that you can insert plastic bottles and cans into and receive a receipt that you can turn in to the cashier or apply it to your grocery bill. Actually, you pay a .15 or .25 Euro deposit when you purchase a bottle and then you receive it back when you put the bottle into the recycling machine. Glass has a different process than plastic. Bottles and jars have to be separated into different colors before you dispose of them because the containers collect different colors of glass separately.

White glass bottles and jars go into the container for white glass. There are also containers for green glass and brown glass.The bottles that you dump into these containers don't get reused because they recycle the glass, not the bottle, so it doesn't matter if the bottle breaks when you throw it away. Only the bottles that you return to the store are reused. But you can't return all bottles to the store, only some for which you had to pay the deposit. For example, if you buy a glass bottle of ketchup you will not pay any deposit for that, as you would throw this glass bottle into the glass container later on.

Most beer is sold in glass bottles and you pay a few cents extra for the bottle, but you can return it to any store that sells the same kind of bottles and get the few cents back that you had to pay extra when you bought it. You have to make sure that if you paid a deposit on a bottle that you get your refund at the store. If you throw them into the container you lose money. Any kind of non-returnable bottle or glass jar on which you did not pay a deposit, can be thrown into glass containers. For example: wine bottles, jam glass jars, oil glass bottles and juice bottles. It has taken me a few weeks to get this to not be such a mind-boggling process. Sometimes I think I have lost money in disposing of a container that I could have received money back on.