Midweek Post

I tend not to write these except when I encounter something new. Since I'm not allowed to really talk about what I do at work, those tend not to happen so much in the middle part of the week. However I thought I'd make a quick post about German recycling, since I went through the process today. Recycling in Germany plastic and glass bottles is essentially mandatory so they make it extremely easy. All you do is take all of your bottles to a local grocery store that has a collection machine, most of the big ones anyway, and put them through the hole. Then it automatically detects what size the bottle is, and gives you the deposit back on a receipt that can either be deducted from your grocery bill or given back as cash. 

Recycling collector in Edeka

The deposits can be pretty high on some types of bottles, the 1.5 liter bottles of soda I've been buying have a deposit of 25 eurocents when they cost about a euro each.

Another observation I've seen at the store here is that Germans are extremely aggressive with those plastic separators on the belt in the checkout line. The instant they put something on the belt, they put the separator behind their stuff. This is regardless of how much they're buying, I've seen many people buying a bag of chips or a can of soda putting the separators on.