Submission (#11109) Approved

Here's the photo of this week's recycle trash we collected.
Plastic: it's a half-filled 120L plastic bag with plastic packagings (so around 60L of plastic)
Food Trash: a small paper-bag full of food left-overs, expired vegetables, etc.
Paper packagings: it's two full Lidl paper-bags with paper and cardboard packagings like cereal boxes. (These are around half meter tall bags.)
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We have been actively sorting our garbage for many years now. In Sweden recycling is very common and required by law. Our community has a recycling booth by every apartment building groups, making recycling very accessible for everyone. Our booth has separate cans for: paper/cardboard, plastic, newspapers, white/coloured glass, metallic packaging (such as bean cans), food leftover trash, batteries and used lightbulbs. According to my research, food trash is used for making fertilizer.
People who have access to car has also the option to take other types of trash to the recycling center such as furnitures and electronics. A few weeks ago when me and my family were cleaning an old house, we took out the destroyed or non-needed furnitures and gadgets, packed it up on a trailer and drove it all to the recycling center.

Cans can also be recycled in the community and earned money from at local grocery stores that always have can-taking-machines encouraging further recycling.

Our community also has donation containers where people can leave used clothes that are still in usable condition and it will be given to people in need.

In our region regular trash that cannot be recycled is used to produce energy by safely burning it up. Factories clean the toxic fumes so the smoke that comes out of the factory chimney is relatively harmless.
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Some objects like clothings, kitchen-wear, books, furnitures, even buttons that are still in usable condition can be donated to second-hand shops that are a very popular choice to swedish people. This way not only are we decreasing garbage but also helping small businesses and also allow people with low-income to get their hands on goods they need. I have always been either donating my clothes to charity or to second-hand shops.
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For further more, we have been using re-usable bags for our groceries nearly everytime we shop. The times when we buy paper/plastic bag on the spot we then keep those bags too and they will be used for garbage recycling or storing (as we use Lidl bags for cardboard trash as shown on the photo).

We also never buy bottled water, we use our re-usable bottles to bring water with us outside. When we buy drinks in plastic bottle, we take those bottles back to the can-taking-machines as those also accept plastic bottles.
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