Wastepaper basket in Augsburg
The waste management and public cleaning service of the City of Augsburg (aws) has over 150 employees who collect waste daily from wastepaper bins and waste bins on the edges of roads and paths in the public space.
Each year the public cleaning service of the City of Augsburg collects approx. 2,300 Mg of waste from wastepaper bins along the different cleaning tours through the city area. bifa Umweltinstitut was engaged to analyse the contents of wastepaper bins in the public space, to find out the size of the packaging waste fraction. In detailed sorting analyses, we examined the contents of 683 emptied wastepaper bins from six city districts. Only around 4 % of them were overfilled.
Disposable paper tableware (18.7 %) accounted for the largest share of the wastepaper bin volume, followed by other packaging made of paper (12.9 %) and cardboard (12.2 %). By contrast, the percentage weight of these fractions is significantly lower and in total is only 18.8 %. The largest share of the wastepaper bin volume in terms of weight is attributable to container glass with 25.8 %. These bottles were primarily for alcoholic drinks.
In total, packaging of all types accounts for around 73 % of the volume. The percentage share of all packaging in the wastepaper bins by weight is around 52 %. The share of non-packaging made of paper, cardboard, glass, plastic and metal is rather low at around 11 % by volume and 14 % by weight. The remaining contents of the wastepaper bins was mainly organic material, especially food waste and dog excrement.