In Derbyshire, UK, we have three bins with different colour lids.

Green- domestic waste, generally bound for landfill, sometimes waste to energy. Anything can go in here but we are deterred from putting toxic material such as batteries in this bin.

Grey- recyclable material such as paper, metal and glass. Some have separate containers for glass.

Brown- garden waste. This one is optional and there is an additional £40 annual fee to use the service (the others are included in the council tax).

Appliances can be left by the roadside and a privately operated metal recycling company will eventually find these. Many scrap yards will buy cars and pay by the kg for the metal. I got about £200 for my 1996 Volvo V40 (~1400kg). Anything else can be disposed of at municipal waste processors which is free for domestic users and charged for commercial waste.

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.

@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

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…

deleted by creator

Two Words: Parker Piles

(Philadelphians will get what I’m saying)

(images obtained from the internet)

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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.