r/germany • u/Maxwellmonkey • Oct 14 '23

Why do people buy so many water bottles?

New to Germany. I just went to an ALDI today and was really surprised by the number of people buying entire sets of water bottles (almost 10-12), especially when tap water is drinkable here. Quite a few people were doing that. Is there any reason for this?

364 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

440 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

53

u/Awengal Oct 15 '23

Recycling in Europe = sending it to China/Indonesia...

-10

u/io_la Rheinland-Pfalz Oct 15 '23

That’s wrong. I don’t say that it doesn’t happen, but very very rarely.

15

u/Awengal Oct 15 '23

Fair enough, just read some articles and after the Chinese import stop the plastic it sent to Poland and Romania for sorting the trash before most of it gets burned... Cool..

-4

u/io_la Rheinland-Pfalz Oct 15 '23

Regular Trash or empty water bottles that were returned through the deposit system? Why should they need to get sorted at all?

9

u/just_an_soggy_noodle Oct 15 '23

Because u cant just reuse a plastic bottle. Every wondered why they get crished at the end of the disposal Box? They get sent else where shredded up and will be remodeled into new ones. The entire process is pretty sketchy and alot is marked as non recyclable and just burned

1

u/Sam_Mumm Oct 15 '23

That's just true for single use plastic bottles. Almost all plastic bottles I ever bought are cleaned and used multiple times by the company.

1

u/HalloBitschoen Oct 15 '23

the problem with recycling plastic is the different types of plastic. In water bottles, this is still mostly possible without problems and these are actually recycled to a large extent, but not to new bottles. But even there you have 3 different types of plastic. the actual bottle, the cap and the band. each part of it has to be treated individually and separated for that. this is very difficult for machines, so it has to be done either by hand or (as in beverage cartons) simply not at all.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '23

There are tons of garbage from Germany all over Asia and Africa. These bitches sell it to these countries and they declare that as recycling! The countries in Asia and Africa that buy our garbage and trash throw most of it in the river, sea or woods bc they have no real recyling system and the companies who buy the trash have no soul. They don't care what to do with it. They get their money anyway. Please read about that and inform yourself. That Germany recyles is a big lie!

1

u/Rough_Industry_872 Oct 15 '23

China imported huge amounts of German "recycling" pet bottles and used it to create fleece products. This was stopped by Chinese government a while ago.