Composting apartment

In some countries there are large (5 cubic meters and more) waste containers serving several buildings. Composting apartment special garbage trucks have been developed for raising these heavy containers and emptying them. Another option is a truck that replaces the container with a clean one, and takes the whole container to the garbage depot.

Tierney also points out that "the prices paid for scrap materials are a measure of their environmental value as recyclables. Scrap aluminum fetches a high price because recycling it consumes so much less energy than manufacturing new aluminum."

In certain areas there is also a recycling service, often with one or more dedicated bins intended to receive items that can be recycled into new products. These bins are sometimes separated into different categories (usually represented by colours) which determine what materials can be inserted into the bin. The contents of the bins are taken to a recycling plant to be processed, and there are various systems for recycling-bin collection: single-bin-combined stream systems, multiple-bin systems, and cyclic collections with different materials collected on different days.

In a 2002 article for The Heartland Institute, Jerry Taylor, director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute, wrote, "If it costs X to deliver newly manufactured plastic to the market, for example, but it costs 10X to deliver reused plastic to the market, we can conclude the resources required to recycle plastic are 10 times more scarce than the resources required to make plastic from scratch. And because recycling is supposed to be about the conservation of resources, mandating recycling under those circumstances will do more harm than good."

The smaller wheelie bins, for domestic or light commercial use, typically hold 120 to 360 litres (26 to 79 imp gal; 32 to 95 US gal), with 240 litres (53 imp gal; 63 US gal) being the most common. They have a hinged flap lid and two wheels on the bottom on the same side as the lid hinge. There is a bar behind the hinge on the top of the bin which is used to move it, or to hoist it up onto a garbage truck for emptying. Composting apartment The 240 litre bin is usually considered to have the same capacity as three traditional waste containers. In the UK, "wheelie bins" for non-recyclable domestic waste are currently collected either weekly or once a fortnight, depending on the local Council's waste management policies.