If you dispose of your yoghurt pot in the yellow bin instead of throwing it in the residual waste, you are doing something for the environment. Apparently more and more Thuringians have come to this realization in the past, because more and more rubbish ends up in the yellow bin. However, one problem remains.
Erfurt (dpa/th) – Within the past ten years, Thuringia has separated more and more waste and then disposed of it in the yellow bin. A spokesman for the Thuringian Ministry of the Environment told the German Press Agency that the Thuringian waste companies collected around 77,000 tons of lightweight packaging in 2011, compared to around 85,000 tons last year. At the same time, the total amount of normal waste generated by private households in Bavaria has fallen from around 685,000 tons ten years ago to around 644,000 tons in 2021.
The proportion of yoghurt pots, tins, toothpaste tubes and similar packaging collected in the yellow bin has increased from 11.2 percent to 13.2 percent of private waste within ten years. Nevertheless, according to the Ministry, there is still some untapped potential in waste separation in the Free State.
According to the German waste separation system, all types of packaging belong in the so-called yellow bin – which is also called the yellow bag in some municipalities – unless it is made of glass, paper or cardboard. In addition to a wide variety of plastic cups and metal cans, plastic films, crown caps and cleaning agent bottles also belong in the yellow bin.
Thuringia’s Environment Minister Anja Siegesmund (Greens) explained that it is even better to separate packaging waste than to avoid it altogether. “We cannot allow the total amount of packaging waste to continue to grow. We have to get down from this mountain of waste.”
A fundamental problem with the lightweight packaging that is collected in the yellow bin has not yet been completely solved in recent years: by no means everything that is collected there is ultimately recycled. Some of the waste separated in this way is incinerated like residual waste.
According to figures from the Central Packaging Register Office, to which the ministry refers, only 76 percent of the beverage cartons collected nationwide were recycled in 2020. For ferrous metals, the rate was higher at 93 percent. Overall, in 2020 only about half of what was disposed of in the yellow bin was actually recycled. This figure also includes the fact that things are regularly thrown into the yellow bins that do not belong there.
The spokesman for the ministry said that consumers are always called upon to use lightweight packaging in a more environmentally friendly manner. “It is important and not very complex, for example, to separate the individual components of the packaging from each other,” he said. This is the only way for the sorting systems to recognize the different materials so that they can actually be recycled afterwards. Yoghurt cups and lids often consist of different recyclable materials, which consumers should separate before throwing them in the yellow bin.
