looks like you got a groupie there mah man :p @darsico , here it's all mandatory and slightly overtaxed as everyting in the 2nd most taxed country in europe, you have blue bags for pet / tetra and the likes, you have glass-day once every month, you have paper day once every month, you have green bio day once every month (or once a week in certain periods like spring) and you have yellow bags for the rest. I think there's a minicontainer for chemicals too but that's not used much anymore since every town (well conglomerate of sorts, several decades ago they decided to put towns together in groups , saves a bit on the number of governments you have , which already is ott) and i think there's a special day for big stuff like furniture and the likes (in case you dont have a car or cant get it to the "container-park") ... if you put one wrong thing in your blue bag then they won't take it. If you get caught for dumping it afterwards you pay more than the price :p
all bags are valid in one township only so say i work in brussels i can't just pick some up from the store next to the office, i HAVE to buy them here (tax et al), the green biowaste requires a sticker (thats also town-specific) , the paper can be put out in carboard boxes (no, HAS TO be actually) and the glass in plastic boxes so they can just pick it up and throw it in the mill-back of the truck, but if you put broken windowglass in it they won't take it either, you're supposed to bring that to the container park yourself (something about the speed they have to maintain to get all houses and pointy glass shards are,, well dangerous )
as for the plastic bottles, i try not to buy any but since i dont have a car and i order groceries like water and cola online from the local supermarket (carrefour.be) i'm stuck with lots of plastic because they don't deliver glass bottles (for the same reason i suppose + it can break)

if i were the dictator of environment in hellgium id simply ban all disposable packaging instead of acting all enlightened on "people need to recycle" and get the problem over with in one strike, no more disposable packaging

but that would mean they can't tax it ofcourse so that's Utopia ...

since you seem to be half-regular on my blog there i suppose you already know how much i like it here, but its not like i dont like the country. If i could i would move to like, mongolia, (the least populated place in asia with lots of free nature and ... AND --> no religious bombers :p )

but here is not really the country although it might look so the whole place is overpopulated concrete with a bit of pasture between

tsk, there i go again talking .... thats maybe why i sometimes get mistaken for bi-polar, i come over like a total introvert, until my mouth opens and i turn into a fishwife :pp

thanks for .. well what you do