Recycling bins are for packaging, not the products themselves. Wooden ice cream stick? That’s “other,” it’s part of the product, at least in Karlstad. The wrapper? That goes in the appropriate recycling bin based on material.

This seems to be based on EU law, which makes sense, so I’ll assume the gist of this is true in other EU countries too.

This has to do with “producentansvar” (“producer responsibility”) which by law requires producers of products to be responsible for the recycling of the packaging, by joining a “collection system that takes operative and financial responsibility for collecting and managing packaging material."1 § 3

This sounds like systems thinking in play: By making producers responsible for recycling, they’re incentivized to create packaging that’s both easy to identify/recycle (cheaper for them) and easy for consumers to sort correctly (to hit reuse targets).

I watched Chris Spargo’s video on Why recycling in England is so complicated? yesterday, which explains how England is going through this shift to Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) right now, and without seeing that video it wouldn’t have clicked as easy when I was reading this now.

(The egg shells don’t qualify as food waste while bones do, I don’t know what to make of that, and apparently it’s the opposite in my mom’s municipality 🤷)