Comment by pjmlp
15 hours ago
Most countries don't do enough at all.
For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal.
As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place, and human nature is as such that hardly anyone will drive to the next recycling center to deliver a single device that broke down, or call the city hall to collect it.
We should go back to the old days, when electronics were repairable, which naturally companies will lobby against, as that will break down the capitalistic curve of exponential growth in sales.
> As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place
In Dutch Mediamarkt, the same company as Saturn in Germany I believe, they have bins for electric devices.
Those are mandatory in Germany. Recently-ish they started forcing supermarkets and other large retailers to accept small electronics, but in practice I never managed to do it. You pretty much have to argue with the staff every time.
https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/sorting-trash-in-germany
For used toner/ink cartridges yes, for electric devices in theory yes, in practice not everywhere.
However that doesn't change the disposable garbage thing, I bet most of them land in some African landfill instead of being properly recycled.
Not sure about electronics as a whole, but I was able to recycle (or at least dispose of properly) an inflated old Dell laptop battery at either a Best Buy or a Home Depot (I'd assume it was the former, but they were next to each other so I don't recall). This is in the US.
Home Depot accepts old batteries. Though it's kind of terrifying because they accept batteries in any condition as long as you put them in individual plastic bags.
And then there's a huge bin of damaged LiPos just chilling by the front door. I'm astonished we don't hear about fires in these bins.
The point is what happens to them when the container full of them ships away.
>As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place
I Portugal there is Rede Electrão. You can deposit those devices in a lot of supermarkets, stores and fire stations.
Thanks for the heads up, I thought the only way was to drive down the city recycling center where they get pilled up inside a shipping container.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/
Maybe Italy is more advanced, you can bring eWaste to the municipal center or to leave to the shop where you are buying a new device. On the street they started to place bin for small eWaste like phones, chargers, keyboards, vape.
> For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal.
Because German environmental policy is about virtue signalling to keep the plebs busy, not solving environmental problems. Nuclear power plants replaced by coal and natural gas, obsession with recycling but nothing done about disposable packaging, car regulations and city design dictated for decades by the car manufacturing lobby, combustion engine limits/bans only when said manufacturers thought they could get on the Tesla gravy train and subsequently rolled back when reality became apparent, it just goes on.
Yeah, what is so hard to have something like this? Sorry only in portuguese, you will need to use automatic translation on it.
https://www.prio.pt/pt/prio-ecowaste
This is only one of the places, there are others where used oil can be brought in.