New Recycling Program in the City of Athens

Starting from last week there are now heaps of new recycling containers all over the city of Athens. On Victoria square there are about 5 of them, they are literally everywhere on the more populated streets. Those containers have three slots (as you might be able to spot from the picture), for paper, aluminium, and glass/plastic (combined).

I'm still meditating on the feasability of combining glass and plastic. Is there some clever machine out there somewhere that will later divide these up? Last I had heard (and seen on TV), recycling glass still involved a lot of manual labour, large belt drives where workers picked up non-glass fragments with thick gloves. Especially ceramics are poison for glass recycling.

At some point it will all come down to the people who are supposd to drop packaging material into those containers. The choice of paper, aluminium, glass, plastic and the placement of the containers suggests, that the plan is to get recycling going at the street trash level. Buy an aluminium can of a soft drin, then drop the can into the recycling container. As opposed to the system of collecting aluminium stuff at home and bring a box of the stuff to a central recycling center later.

We will see how the habits of people can adapt to this plan. In any case it would be nice if it works out. Myself I am more worried about battery recycling: I might be wrong, but I haven't heard anything about battery recycling in Greece yet. And the Greeks consume a hell of a lot of batteries. Myself I got a small pile waiting at home for some information where I can properly dispose of them (because of the lack of such information, I'm very reluctant to use anything battery powered).