What to do with garbage in Dresden, Part 1

When we got here, we received a booklet from the relocation company with numerous information about Dresden. It has info from doctors to schools for children. One of the items that, right away, called my attention was garbage collection. I found it was really complicated compared to what we did in Brasil (organic or recyclable, basically) and thought I would have to check the book every time I needed to throw something away (not really, haha).

Of course, with time, I got used to it. I decided to write this post so you can see the difference and, maybe, help someone that's not so fortunate to have such a book.

Since the subject is quite extensive, I'll divide it in two parts: the garbage that's collected at your house and the one you need to take somewhere. Today, I'll talk about the garbage the city hall collects at your place.

Garbage cans in front of a building.

These garbage cans with colored lids are placed in front of the buildings. You take your trash there and the city hall collects it once a week. In our street it's every Thursday.

You start organizing the trash inside. I don't know if every house has this, but our apartment came with three trash cans installed under the sink. I decided they would be "yellow", "blue" and "black" to correspond to the trash can outside where each one would go. The "brown" garbage we put in smaller bags and take out as soon as possible, because it gets stinky fast.

In some buildings, the garbage cans are really big like this one. 

I'll describe briefly what goes in which can:

Yellow: plastic and metal. Here you put from body lotion bottles to bottle caps (metal or plastic ones). You don't put electronics, appliances or batteries.

Blue: clean paper. Newspapers, books (the horror!), magazines. Do not put dirty paper.

Brown: organic. Old food, gardening waste. Do not put meat or fish here!

Black: household waste. Also known as "everything that doesn't go anywhere else" - like meat, fish and broken appliances.

So these are the kinds of garbage that are collect at your place. On the next post, I'll write about the kinds of garbage you need to take somewhere.