Swiss rubbish: the bag, the fines, and the bags they open

There is no Swiss bag price, and almost every English page implies there is

Prices are set by the commune or the waste association, not the country. In Zurich the fee is fixed but the shop sets the shelf price on top, so the same 35-litre bag runs from roughly CHF 15.49 to CHF 23.90 for a pack of ten depending on which supermarket you walk into.

Verified prices for a 35-litre bag: Basel-Stadt CHF 2.70 since 1 January 2026, its first rise in eighteen years, and only the official blue Bebbi-Sagg is accepted. Zug CHF 2.50. Lausanne CHF 1.95. Lucerne CHF 1.70. Bern about CHF 1.41 including VAT. Zurich about CHF 1.41 in fee terms.

Bags come in 17, 35, 60 and 110 litres nationally, with a 10-litre bag in Zurich and Basel. There is no 100-litre bag, despite one widely read English page saying so.

Geneva has no bag tax at all

The canton finances disposal from general taxation and made sorting compulsory instead, adopted 2 September 2022 with enforcement from the second year. If you move from Zurich to Geneva and go looking for the taxed bag, you will not find one, and if you move the other way and do not buy one, you will be fined.

The costs you did not know were coming

The bag is not the whole bill. Zurich adds an annual base fee of CHF 23.80 per residential unit, billed to the owner. Lausanne adds a taxe de base of CHF 0.24 excluding VAT per cubic metre of building volume, also on the owner. Both usually reach you through the service charges.

Lucerne applies per-bag weight limits that almost no English guide mentions: 5 kg on a 17-litre bag, 10 kg on 35 litres, 15 kg on 60, and 20 kg on 110. A heavy bag is a rejected bag.

They do open the bags

Zurich, Winterthur, Aarau, St. Gallen and Basel all search improperly presented waste, looking for addressed material — letters, invoices, parcel labels — to use as evidence. Geneva's own cantonal page acknowledges that sound, odour, bag shape and weight can trigger an inspection.

Basel-Stadt publishes an exact schedule: CHF 100 for littering, CHF 100 for household waste in a public street bin, CHF 200 for illegal disposal of household, bulky or electronic waste in public space, and CHF 50 for putting waste out at the wrong time. Elsewhere the numbers that circulate are reported cases rather than published tariffs, so treat them as such: around CHF 300 to 320 in Zurich for timing and bag offences, CHF 50 in Winterthur for a black bag, CHF 80 in St. Gallen.

One honest limit: no leading Federal Court decision squarely settles the privacy question. Inspection services do this under cantonal and communal waste law, waste presented for collection is treated as abandoned, and what they find is routinely used to issue fines. Nobody should tell you a court has blessed it, because none has.

The cardboard string rule is real, and so is the fine

A CHF 270 fine has been issued for a cardboard bundle presented without string. Tie your cardboard.

Where the English guides are most out of date: plastic

Historically all mixed plastic packaging went into the taxed bag. Since 2024, RecyPac has been rolling out a nationwide RecyBag collection for mixed plastic packaging and beverage cartons, bought in shops and returned at retail sites and communal depots. Coverage is partial and expanding, and no English page found mentions it at all.

Glass, PET and metal have no deposit in Switzerland. Glass is funded by an advance disposal fee of two to six centimes per bottle, unchanged since 2002. Every shop selling single-use PET drinks must take the empties back, across roughly 72,719 collection points.