Vejen Kommune staff hand-sorted nearly 1,200 kilos of household residual waste from 393 private homes and found that about half of it belonged in a recycling bin.
The municipality in southern Jutland emptied the contents of residents’ residual waste bins into a single pile and went through it by hand. DR reports that three employees spent four full days sorting the more than one thousand kilos of trash.
One of them was May-Britt Heissel Skov, a waste consultant at Vejen Kommune. Per DR, she said she was surprised by the amounts of food waste and plastic found in the residual bins.
The results differed by housing type. In the single-family house areas, half of what had been thrown in the residual bin should have gone somewhere else to be recycled. From apartments, almost 60 percent of the waste was placed in the wrong bin.
What residents got wrong most often
Food waste and food still in its packaging were the biggest misplaced categories in both houses and apartments. In apartment buildings, food waste alone made up 20 percent of the wrongly sorted material, according to DR.
Hard and soft plastic was found in nearly every residual waste bag. In Vejen, both types go in the same bin, but DR notes that sorting rules vary from one municipality to the next.
Garden waste was the third most wrongly sorted type. Bags of leaves, moss and large branches have to be driven to the municipal recycling center, known as a genbrugsplads.
Clothing accounted for 2.2 percent of the misplaced waste. Textiles that are whole, clean and presentable should be handed in for reuse, while torn and dirty items belong in textile waste.
Staff also found bags of syringes, both with and without caps. These must never go in residual waste and have to be handed in at a pharmacy, DR reports, and most pharmacies can provide an approved container for storing needles.
The myth the municipality wants thrown out
Skov said the aim of the study is to shift residents’ habits now that the municipality knows what goes wrong. She told DR that changing habits is difficult, but that the figures show real potential in the residual bin.
When she gives talks in housing associations, she almost always meets the claim that the waste all ends up mixed together anyway. As stated by Skov, that is not the case, because the garbage trucks have divided compartments just like the bins.
Danish municipalities are responsible for handling household waste, which is why the number of sorting categories differs between them. The Danish Environmental Protection Agency, Miljøstyrelsen, has calculated the effect of sorting. When one household sends its household waste to recycling instead of incineration, the saving corresponds to that household’s annual energy use for its washing machine, dryer and dishwasher.
What the Vejen findings mean for internationals in Denmark
For foreign residents, the key point in the Vejen audit is that there is no single national bin system. Because waste handling is a municipal task, the categories, the bin colors and the rules for things like soft plastic can change when you move from one kommune to another. The Danish words on the lids are usually restaffald for residual waste, madaffald for food waste, haveaffald for garden waste and tekstilaffald for textile waste.
The study also shows which items commonly end up in the wrong place in households, including packaged food, bags of leaves, clothing and used needles. Vejen Kommune’s own regulativ for husholdningsaffald, the municipal waste regulation, states that fees can be charged for repeated misclassification of waste. Residents in apartment buildings, where the error rate was close to 60 percent, share bins with neighbors, so the sorting is a collective result.
