Endless Categories of Garbage

We can see dumpsters coloured Green,Blue and Yellow at our doorsteps. Green is for the Bio wastes like egg shells,peels and scraps of food leftovers and also used tissues.

Paper is thrown inside the blue bins. That includes cardboard boxes, envelopes, newspapers, magazines, paper bags. The cardboard boxes have to be flattened before trashing inside the bin

The yellow bins are used to thrash the plastic items and other non paper packaging item

Glass

Any kind of glass jars or glass bottles that are non returnable can be dropped in the glass dumpsters. Jam bottles,wine bottles,oil bottles can be dropped into these however the mirrors,broken windows,drinking glasses and ceramics does not belong to this section.

Glass dumpsters are of three colours green,brown and clear glass. All places do not have residential dumpsters for glass, in that case we can use the public containers. And the noise from dropping the glasses into the containers is to be avoided during the "Ruhezeiten"(Silent hours) between 13:00-15:00 hrs and on sundays. 

Batteries

Batteries are usually disposed in a small bins which you can find in your local supermarkets.

Plastic Bottles

The refundable plastic bottles can be identified by the specific recycle symbol which you find in the plastic bottles and you get the 'pfand ' back which you have paid when you have bought it, normally 25cents. It is supposed to be dropped in the automatic bottle return machines you find in the supermarkets.

Others

The bulky household items like sofa, cupboard, table, bed are collected on a scheduled specific day on your streets. Many Germans also stick a note 'verschenken' on the items which means it can be taken by anybody without a penny.

All the items which do not come under any of the above mentioned are "Restmüll". It goes into the black bin.

'Abfallkalendar' (Trash calender)  lists pick-up days by street name when the garbage collection trucks come, plus it also contains cards for the other random crap pick-ups.

Now that we all know what goes into which bin, we should also know when to roll the bins out for the collection. In many places the truck driver or the worker does it by themselves and in many apartments the residents take turns.

Above mentioned garbage segregation may slightly differ in each state in Germany.