In Germany it depends on the town. You separate paper most of the time (maybe nearly everywhere), and some apartment complexes also have bins for organics (not

In Germany it depends on the town. You separate paper most of the time (maybe nearly everywhere), and some apartment complexes also have bins for organics (not composting per se, but will be taken for composting). Some towns mandate you also separate all recyclable plastic, some don't. If you have bulky stuff you either put it on the curb or haul it to communal collection stations/scrapyard, where it's free to offload "a small van full per day" if you have a local license plate. Sometimes people are waiting in front of it and will take anything looking good right out of your hands, but the employees at the scrapyard may also grab some things, afaik they resell this for a low price then (a bit picky though, they didn't want a CRT monitor that I was still using until that day because they already had a slew of 17" LCDs, psss :P). I don't think it's illegal to remove stuff there, but I'd have to check - or you have to pay a small fee. There have actually been court cases where people were sued by supermarkets when they salvaged produce from the bins (probably trespassing charges, you can google for "containern"=dumpster diving + "urteile"=verdict).