From today’s Sunday Times, a story about community recycling monitoring taken to the extreme:

In Berlin every block of flats has a communal bin house where you separate paper and cardboard, bio waste and Wertstoffe (all other recyclables). “There’s a fair bit of peer pressure to recycle properly,” says Oliver Moody, our Berlin correspondent. “The state of the bins and the assiduity of the sorting probably account for a solid quarter of the messages in our local WhatsApp group.” When a sleep-deprived Moody (accidentally) left a used nappy in the wrong bin, it caused a scandal. “We were singled out as dreckspatzen or ‘dirt-sparrows’.”

Sunday Times, London
18 February 2024