What percentage of your productive capacity is used for proper recycling and garbage disposal? ...that's the real metric to measure Germanness by, and yet it never got mentioned once!

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throwaway2037 a day ago | parent [-]

I don't know why people make such a big deal out of this. When I travelled to Germany on holiday, it was a good sign to me that there were so many different bins. It tells me that they are doing a lot of recycling and very little dumping into landfills. If you look at other similarly rich countries that care a lot about the environment, it is similar.

	▲	gyulai 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		...if you've only visited and never lived here for an extended period of time, you haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg. Also, the rules and systems are different from one municipality to another. Here are some of the highlights for the one I live in. AI image recognition on garbage trucks. -- Yes you've heard right. You do still need a fax machine in Germany to interact with the government. But when it comes to the garbage: Bring in the f##ing AI!! -- If you get the separation or packaging wrong, they won't collect the ton, and will instead leave a note to chastise you. You can meditate on your love for the green party, as you rummage through your weeks-old biodisposables to re-separate, and thank them next time at the polling booth. Some kinds of garbage can go in the collections, others need to go to a recycling center. Just load up your car with everything you need to get rid of. Drive to a recycling center. Find out that it's closed (opening hours are maximally inconvenient; plan on burning several vacation days for visits to recycling centers that are open during your core working hours only). Once you make it to the recycling center, someone will take X, but tell you they don't take Y, and to try the recycling center several towns over. Of course they are closed. Plan on having your car serve as a garbage truck for several weeks, before it's finally empty. Of course, some things you can't get rid of at any recycling center: They need to go to a collection. Do you have several cubic meters of styrofoam to dispose of, after re-furnishing your apartment from IKEA? Well tough luck. Find a place to store them for several weeks until the next collection. Then cut them into pieces so they fit in the yellow bag, which is only available in a single size. Then put the many many bags out into the street. If it's a windy day, collect that stuff from all over the street several times. If you're lucky, the garbage truck actually arrives. More likely: You miss the collection several times, because the pickup times are maximally inconvenient and unpredictable. In the meantime, the storage problem is all yours. Do I need to continue? Because I could continue.