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.

Scotland. Five bins outside my house - biodegradable, plastic, paper/card, glass and landfill. Everything collected twice a month except landfill (every 3 weeks). Drop-off centre for anything bulky, charity donations etc. All handled by local gov and paid for by local taxes. Works pretty well tbh. Socialism ftw 💪

Some people get their knickers in a twist about all the bins or the infrequency of collections but neither bothers me.

City picks up

• bins of trash
• bins of recycling, single stream, unsorted
• yard waste, bagged
• fallen leaves at the curb , once
• Christmas trees, once

Call ahead

• furniture and appliances

Third party

• composting
• electronics

Drop off

• hazardous waste, every other month

I’ve gotten yelled at for unbagged trash. I never hit a limit of how much but there’s a rat problem. I also got yelled at for too little. Apparently the landfill that takes hazardous waste was charging the town $40/car so the town wanted to be sure it was worth it

So, in the apartment complex I live in, US, we have 2 dumpsters where everyone dumps basically anything and everything, regardless of whether it should be recycled or whatever else. I’m personally not the biggest fan of that, but what can you do when even basically all the maintenance people have stopped working here, telling you how it’s run here?

I personally hate it because they don’t get emptied frequently enough that it will absolutely overflow from lazy people of all types not wanting to throw their trash into the back half of the damn dumpsters! And don’t even get me started on people not breaking down boxes, which is something your supposed to do, even though it’s not enforced. Wouldn’t mind if they did enforce it somehow, though.

Germany.
It’s slightly different in every county, but generally the county has the responsibility to pick up household trash, and contracts it out to a private company.
They pay the company and charge a fee per bin from the home owners to get the money back. The homeowner collects the fee from renters.
The bins are all a standard size, but some towns offer bins with an inlay that reduces capacity for a lower fee, to encourage reducing the amount of trash you produce.
Additionally, there are bins for paper/cardboard, glass, and plant matter, which cost no fee, and one for plastics where the fee is charged to the manufacturer of the product containing plastics.
4 times a year you can schedule a special pickup for items that are too big to fit in the bins, furniture, etc. Often, if you put that stuff on the curb in the evening, only half of it will be left by the time it’s picked up in the morning, cause people will load everything that can still be used or fixed into their white panel van and sell it in Eastern Europe.
Every store selling electronics has to take back electronics waste and batteries for free, by law.
Everything else has to be dropped off at a recycling center and the cost is charged to you directly by type and weight.
The system is pretty decent IMO.

Ireland

It’s privatized so we pay monthly based on weight and a standing charge.

3 wheelie bins, one black for general rubbish, one green for recyclables, one brown for compost. Our collection is weekly for black bin and alternate the other bins every week.

Recycling is clean dry waste including paper, plastic, tins. Glass is brought separately yourself to bottle bins and sorted by colour. Usually there are charity run bins for old clothes there too.

We have a return system for plastic and cans too which are at supermarkets usually and you get your deposit back, 15c for small stuff, 25c for larger.

All this means we have in the kitchen… 1 rubbish bin, 1 recycling bin, 1 compost bin, 3 large bags for bottles by colour, 1 large back for return stuff. And it’s not a big space, it’s a real pain.

In Thailand (and Vietnam, Philippines) where I often live plastic recycling is basically non existent and I think it’s a good thing, let me explain.

The value of plastic and recyclability is really low but exposure overhead is massive (thrash being lost to ocean etc) and after visiting a trash burning facility myself I’m completely converted to trash burning. On paper plastic recycling make sense but it so low value with absurdly high overhead - just getting plastic straight to the incinerator as fast as we can is the best thing we can do imo.

As for other materials like aluminum it’s very recycled everywhere I’ve been as it pays very decent money.

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.

As a Canadian it’s fucking embarrassing. Good on the Philippines for calling us out for fake recycling. Ever since those trash barges got called out we stopped pretending to recycle so much.

Did we improve afterwards? Fuck no. Does anybody care? Doesn’t seem like anyone did. In fact, big restrictions on what can be recycled at home now. To counter the obvious side effect of people trashing stuff more often they changed garbage pick up from once a week to once every two weeks. Compost and recycling remain weekly.

How does that work out? Badly. I’m going to to the local dump now and then to recycle a few things they refuse to take at home now like GLASS for example. Actual garbage we manage to barely make it fit usually. Anything extra like a small reno project is too much and I’m doing a dump run at my own expense on top of the $75 a month I’m paying for worse service now.

City owned Black bin garbage and green bin compost. Blue or transparent plastic bags for recycle…film cannot be recycled. Big chunks of cardboard is just loose. I’d say film “used to be recycled” but that was all lies. Shipped overseas for burning. Now it’s local landfill I guess.

We’re just two adults. I don’t know what child having families do. Well, some get a second garbage bin for extra $$$ a month.

Thrash can and recycling bin. Everything is mixed in the bin so I expect most of it is sent to a third world country or ends up on a landfill anyways.

Recycling is a lie.

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

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!

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.

There are some little organisations like Pedal People that collect and dispose of waste via bicycle. I don’t have something like this in my area, but it’d be nice.

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.