Whether it is a result of negligence, mistake, or the residents’ ignorance, 57% of the organic waste produced by the households in Barcelona is not thrown away into the container of the corresponding color (for the organic waste there is a brown container). At the same time, 20% of the garbage that ends up in the brown containers, such as boxes, clothes, cans, and other non-organic wastes, should have been discarded into another container. In the long run, negligent garbage sorting results in the slowdown of the entire waste processing cycle.
In 2010, the waste numbers recycled were 39.5% due to the sorting method implemented in Barcelona. Six years later, the results were worse, at 35.9%. This figure is still worse than an average index around Catalonia (38.9% in 2016), and it is still far from the general European target of 50% by the year 2020.
With the purpose of improving the quality of independent garbage sorting, the Ayuntamiento of Barcelona has approved the installation of information kiosks on the streets of four city districts (Barceloneta, Roquetes, El Putxet i el Farró, and El Guinardo). Frederic Ximeno, the Advisor on Ecology Issues, states that increasing the level of knowledge among the population about garbage sorting is an important step on the way to recycling 100% of wastes in the future.