Neighborhood Ecopontos

How to throw away household trash in Porto?  After living here for a week, this was our question as we had accumulated a reasonable amount and realized we had no idea what to do with it.  

In New York, the city comes and collects it from your building so residents are expected to place their rubbish in designated trash area (usually a room, chute, or bin outside the building).  In Porto however, there are no bins in sight, either inside or outside of your building.  After some research, we learned that in Portugal, households need to instead bring their trash and recyclables to designated points called ecopontos, which are spread throughout the city.  

We wandered around our neighborhood and finally found our local one.  The bins were nestled into trees and bushes, which I must admit added a slightly luxurious feel to them. 

Household rubbish needs to be placed in these massive round trash cans approximately 5 feet wide and 4 feet tall.  These bins are really interesting as they are placed over what seems like mammoth pits.  When you drop your trash in, it takes awhile before you actually hear the *thud* that it hit the bottom.

For your recyclables however, you'll need to separate them out into these 3 bins:  yellow for plastic, green for glass, blue for paper. Pretty simple and kind of fun.

Since finding my local ecopontos, I've noticed them whenever I walk in different neighborhoods and realize they come in all different shapes and sizes. Some are more sightly than others but voila! I hope this helps if you are in Porto yourself and find yourself with the same question.

It's always interesting seeing how different cities and countries handle regular daily life situations.  This one was pretty noteworthy to me.