This post is full of garbage
The Swiss take their trash pretty seriously. Anybody who sends a 16-page pamphlet about trash and recycling procedures to every household in the city, and who also makes copies available in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Serbian and Turkish, takes their trash and recylcing pretty seriously. We received our 2006 Abfallkalender (trash calendar) on Friday. We now know the dates for trash pickup, paper recycling pickups, Grünabfuhr (garden waste, dead plants and leaves, etc), and old metal for the entire year. We also know the date the city will take away our Christmas tree, the location of the Tierkörpersammelstelle (what to do with animals who have passed to the Great Beyond), and how to properly dispose of batteries, car batteries, printer cartrages and toner, CDs, old electric cabels, skis and snowboards and more. Like I said, the Swiss take their trash pretty seriously. The Swiss also recycle 91% of household aluminum (PDF, in German only), so they must be doing something right. You may laugh at the Abfallkalender, but Switzerland is a recycling powerhouse.
I think this is due in large part to the fact that you have to pay for each bag of trash you put out at the kerb. Trash stickers (Gebührenmarke) are available at the grocery stores and larger Kiosks. Prices range from 70 Rappen (100 Rappen to a Swiss Franc) for a 17-liter bag to 4Francs40 for a 110-liter bag. We put out two 35-liter bags a week at 1Franc40 per bag. If you don't put Gebührenmarke on your trash bags, or if you try to pass off a 35-liter bag with a 17-liter sticker, the trash collectors simply won't pick it up. (You may, however, cut a 35-liter sticker in half on the diagonal and put half a 35-liter sticker on a 17-liter bag.) There are trash inspectors who go through Gebührenlos bags (bags without trash stickers) to find anything that might identify the "owner," who is then sent a stiff fine. It's also illegal to dump your household trash in city trash bins, in the park for example, and you can get a fine for this as well.
Personally, I think this is a great system, so long as you pay attention to when you are running out of trash stickers and go buy more on time! It encourages recycling and puts more of the burden of the cost of trash collection on the people who generate the most trash. We recycle as much as possible - toilet paper rolls, egg cartons, envelops that don't have the plastic windows in them (not acceptable), and cereal and pasta boxes, as shown in this picture.
Ten points to the person who can guess why they did not, however, pick up this particular parcel. You Swissies out there should know this. Paper and carton recycling is picked up at the kerb (in our neighborhood they come twice a month) but we have to bring glass, plastic and aluminium products to a depot ourselves. In our case there is a collection point for all of this at our neighborhood grocery store five minutes away. We can also bring old batteries there.
Doing trash right in Switzerland takes a bit of organization and storage space, and you have to remember to keep a stock of trash stickers on hand, but it really works. Trash stickers - one of the little things I love about Switzerland, and something I wish the US would import.
And the reason they didn't pick up that recycling bundle is...
I didn't collapse the big box on the bottom!
Labels: Schweizermacher
7 Comments:
Gosh. We have a similar system, but instead of stickers we pay the big bucks for a roll of official garbage bags - either 20, 35 or 50 litre. Plastic and metal packaging, paper and glass have to be sorted and go into clear recycling bags, which are free. We throw the rest of our organic garbage on the compost (and also don't have a baby in diapers) so we get away with only one 35l garbage bag a week and a lot of "Wertstoffsäcke".
I miss living in Germany for this reason. People are responsible for their crap in a different way than they are here, where everything is a "given right"
I cackled at the reason the parcel wasn't collected. Got to love the Swiss for doing things by the book, though, right?
Very interesting. I've been planning to do a post on this subject, but I've been a little shy about photographing our apartment building's recycling/ trash center. It sounds like there are many similarities between Korean, Swiss, and German systems for handling trash. It's appalling the way many locales in the U.S. do not have a good system for mandating compliance. In Chicago, recycling is entirely optional.
The system is good, but sometimes abit too ridged.. like that box you didn't collapse... .. I mean.. come on! :-)
Here in France we have a different system.
Three different bins (trash cans) provided by the local council and picked up by them too. This is paid for by your obigatory local taxes.
It works likes this:
Green - Glass only
Yellow - Plastic, tins and card and paper
Brown - The rest
The green and yellow are picked up once a week and the brown twice weekly. You just need to leave them on the kerb.
In addition the first friday of every month they collect 'heavy goods'. You name it and it is picked up. From sacks of leaves to old chairs and even fridges/ovens etc..
This is a pretty good system I think, and most play along.
Christina (Deutschland) - back in Small Village we paid for special trash bags, too, rather than stickers. I'm not sure why the city uses the sticker system.
It's definitely the diapers that put us into the second trash bag - that and back in Small Village we composted but we haven't figured out how to do that in an apartment block, you know. And kitty litter. Yes, those three things cost us an additional 1 franc 40 a week!
Sandra - strictly speaking the system is voluntary - you don't have to recycle, you just have to pay for it if you don't. They don't mandate compliance so much as they attempt to punish noncompliance. Plastic recycling rates are pretty low, by Swiss standards, (I want to say below 80%, but can't find a number right now) and they're threatening to put a deposit on plastic bottles if people don't get their act together on the plastics. I blame the city for this, as the plastic recycling bins are the responsibility of stores - on the perverse logic that it's the stores that sell things in plastic bottles - rather than the city. So if you buy a soda on a hot day and walk around the city drinking it, when you're finished you're hard pressed to find a recycling container, but trash bins are everywhere. So people put them in the trash.
Welcome Leon!
Actually, my town in the US also requires that we pay for special trash bags. The program has only been in place for a few years, but it's definitely encouraged us to be more stringent with our recycling and composting.
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