A green Bavaria makes the Brits look bad

[Gen 2,454]

Annoying if you don't have the Gelben Sack / Gelbe Tonne / yellow bag though. We don't have it either.

[MonksTown 104]

When we used to have metal and glass recycling, the cleaning was easy.

When you wash up, you do glass-china-pans. I just added containers at the end.

[MunichMag 157]

 

The answer is to look for the Grüner Punkt. Every product with this symbol on can be recycled and goes either in glass or the gelbe Tonne! The company that manufactured it has paid Duales Stystem Deutschland to use their symbol, just in case you wonder who's making the profit. But if DSD finds non-recyclables in their yellow bins then it's they who have to pay to get rid of it!! A vicious circle, in other words.

 

Please though, lieber MünchnerMag with the aerosols - make sure they go in the yellow.

 

Answers to any more questions about what goes where you'll most likely find on an interesting feature made by WDR's Quarks team at http://www.wdr.de/tv/quarks/global/pdf/Q_Muell2.pdf

 

Pages 18-20 especially useful, if you've got the time, and understand German of course.

 

Happy Sorting!

Except that we don't have the yellow sack in Munich. We just have the receycling points on various streets with the the big containers for glass, plastic and aluminium. Everything else goes in the general waste. Even if we did have the yellow sack system, it isn't ideal, as how many people living in a city center flat have space for a yellow sack which is collected (presumably) only every two weeks. We just about have space to collect the glass and plastic and take them to the recycling once a week. For us, cans go straight in the general waste as we don't have space to collect those as well. What would be idea would be a 'yellow bin' for each building for anything with the Grüner Punkt apart from glass.

[Mik Dickinson 443]

Now now people did you know that the biggest recycling plant is in Birmingham UK and that the Germans transport their stuff there to have it recycled and then buy the stuff back

[Stephenl 0]

I agree with Monkstown about his home council having better recycling facilities. I come from Bexley in SE London/ NW Kent (which I know is better than most other boroughs in our area) and I think people back home have pretty much got recyling instilled in them. I can't recycle tin cans in my wohnblock and I see loads of cardboard and organic waste in the normal waste bins whenever I go there.

 

Steve

[Jorgan 12]

On the flip-side, all those big cars doing 200kph plus on the Autobahn isn't very green...at all.

 

If you come from the UK you may have seen the 'Clever-dumb balance' credit card advert on TV. It's like that in Germany; for every good idea/rule they have, they contradict it with another.

[kato 3,559]

 

Less than one per cent of the remaining waste ends up as landfill.

Gee, you think that might have something to do with landfills now being illegal in Germany and all closed since mid-2006?

 

(for waste anyway; building materials can and are still reused in landfills)

[RogerM 4]

I was in Germany in the early 90s and they were well-ahead then, but I come back after 16 years and they don't seem to have moved on. My"home" council in Devon seems to have it really well sorted, and 5 years in Sweden taught me that yes, there are places that do it better - one small example, almost universal deposit system on bottles and cans which can be taken back anywhere.

[Matt T 174]

Out where I live (LK Rosenheim) we don't have gelbe tonnen. We get to take our packaging to the local recycling centre, which is open for 4 hours a week, where we have to sort it all into one of 9 different containers (and that's just for packaging). I suspect the reason most people do it is only because the bins for restmuell are too small, and emptied too seldom, to be able to throw everything in there.

 

That said, I enjoy the warm, fuzzy, earth-saving feeling I get as I separate my plastic bottles from my plastic trays, and found it strange to be throwing so much packaging in with the regular rubbish while I was back home in Oz.

[MonksTown 104]

The UK is also reducing "restmüll" bin capacity to force people to recycle more.

[Jorgan 12]

 

We get to take our packaging to the local recycling centre, which is open for 4 hours a week

 

 

What was that I said about the clever/dumb balance out here...let me guess, is it a 4h period when most people are at work, or is it a saturday morning when you'd rather be doing something more interesting with your free time?!

 

Sorry to be so cynical :lol:

[Gen 2,454]

Update: the Wertstoffinseln (for glass, metal, and plastic) are where you bring your packaging.  A map of all of them is here: https://geoportal.muenchen.de/portal/awm/ and I read somewhere that the city believes that nobody lives further than 200 meters away from one - check the map and maybe there's one on your way to work if you just go up a different street for part of your journey.

Explanations of what goes in which bin: https://www.awm-muenchen.de/english/information-in-english.html

Also, the city believes that all households have a brown bin for organic waste.  Their data says my own building has had one since 2005 - but it hasn't.  The lady on the AWM phone suggested our Hausmeister might have hidden it because he didn't like cleaning it - that apparently happens regularly.  But we have a right to a Biotonne, and the AWM will simply deliver us another one.  I wish I'd realized that years ago!

[Uncle Jamal 132]

The Wertsoffhöfer are great! A trip once or twice a week is the norm for me. Why wouldn't we all want to use one? A great idea that the UK could/should copy.

[BadDoggie 1,575]

On 1/29/2021, 11:20:33, Uncle Jamal said:

The Wertsoffhöfer are great… A great idea that the UK could/should copy.

 

And having workers follow the collections truck to clean out Bio-Tonnen (brown/green bins) with pressure washers every couple of months is a great UK idea that Krautreich should copy.

 

woof.

[snowingagain 5,204]

They used to do the same thing here (though only once a year I think).  No more though. 

[pmd 685]

1 hour ago, BadDoggie said:

 

And having workers follow the collections truck to clean out Bio-Tonnen (brown/green bins) with pressure washers every couple of months is a great UK idea that Krautreich should copy.

 

woof.

 

Do you not have to put your kitchen bio waste in brown paper bio bags first? I have to here in NRW. You just have to make sure the bag isn't soggy (and might freeze to the side of the bin and break open) - I just put a few pages of old newspaper in the bottom of the bag first. Bio bin stays clean.

[snowingagain 5,204]

We don't.  I mean they did say bio waste should only be in paper bags, but what they meant was not plastic or bio plastic bags.  No problem loose.  Also wrapping in newspaper works well.  Plus your tip of paper at the bottom works well.  Corrugated cardboard even better.

[BadDoggie 1,575]

1 hour ago, pmd said:

 

Do you not have to put your kitchen bio waste in brown paper bio bags first?

"Leaks".

"Odo(u)rs".

 

"Insects".

 

woof.

[kiplette 8,677]

Yup - here we used to just chuck it all in, but smells and insect eggs etc. were horrid. 

 

This time around, we have always lined the bin with crunchy leaves, scrunched up newspaper, whatever, and then wrapped everything. Massive improvement. Also a great use for the leftover newspapers...

[Metall 14,514]

Are you sure you can put newspaper in the bio bin?