- Returning bottles is a pain because it's hard to identify which bottles have Pfand, and which supermarkets will accept all of them.
- In Berlin, if you're drinking outside, just leave your empties by a bin and they'll get collected. If you drink in a large park, people will even walk around collecting them. People marvel at how efficiently it happens, but aren't blind to why it happens.
- Bottles from other states will be returned there. Each bottle type goes back somewhere. Sometimes the return distance alone can raise environmental concerns - I know someone who's studying this.
- The German's love for recycling is real. You might even find passive-aggressive notes in your apartment lobby aimed at "whoever does it wrong". Recycling is just very complicated: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/sorting-trash-in-germany
https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/pfand-bottles
Some interesting facts:
- Returning bottles is a pain because it's hard to identify which bottles have Pfand, and which supermarkets will accept all of them.
- In Berlin, if you're drinking outside, just leave your empties by a bin and they'll get collected. If you drink in a large park, people will even walk around collecting them. People marvel at how efficiently it happens, but aren't blind to why it happens.
- Bottles from other states will be returned there. Each bottle type goes back somewhere. Sometimes the return distance alone can raise environmental concerns - I know someone who's studying this.
- The German's love for recycling is real. You might even find passive-aggressive notes in your apartment lobby aimed at "whoever does it wrong". Recycling is just very complicated: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/sorting-trash-in-germany