This is not only cultural and has nothing to do with the Swiss being more ethical or better people. As always, in Switzerland the system is very smart: The mai

This is not only cultural and has nothing to do with the Swiss being more ethical or better people. As always, in Switzerland the system is very smart: The main reason for the high recycling rate in Switzerland is that a 35 liter trash bag costs around 80 cents. The cost for the garbagemen etc. is included in the purchase price of the trash-bag. (Also, the trash-bag is of high-quality and never rips, so garbagemen who get a >4000 CHF monthly salary, almost never waste time picking up trash from ripped trash-bags.) This is unbelievably smart because this nudges people recycle everything: Paper, carton, glas, metal, and plastic bottles are all thrown away in extra containers that are distributed conveniently within the neighbourhoods. People really fill the expensive, high-quality trash-bags mostly with non-recyclable stuff. If you put in recyclable stuff there is no punishment or anything, you just have to buy more bags, which hurts your pocket. Compare that to Germany where they rolled out a machinary of expensive plastic-bottle-bar-code reading robots in each and every supermarket that had to be engineered, maintained and protected against tampering/hacking/fraud with false bottles (from Eastern Europe).