Moving back to Germany I anticipated a few obstacles and a little bit of “reverse culture shock”, but about important things – like work, housing, health insurance, politics – not about something as mundane as trash. I vaguely remembered, that Germans separate their trash – but I didn’t expect to see the system that far blown out of proportion!
The handling of trash has become a science. Housholds have to deal with it on an individual basis, the cities and communities may, or may not, offer full-service garbage collection. When you move into a new town, your first visit to their website should be for information about garbage, and how to handle it.
Where I live, I have to sort my trash into a dozen different categories
Bottles with refundable deposit
Recyclables
cardboard and paper
brown glass
green glass
white glass
Compostables
only plant based organic material
Packaging
all packing materials that are not cardboard, paper, or glass
Waste
everything else, except toxic waste
Toxic
paint
chemicals, pills
light bulbs, electronics
batteries
Only 3 of these categories of trash will be picked up at my house by the municipal garbage removal service: compostables (my 80l green bin) and waste (my 120l black bin) on trash day in alternate weeks, and packaging (in about 3 big yellow plastic bags) once a month.
Everything else I need to haul around to find proper disposal locations, and times when they are open. Refundable bottles have to be returned to the store, where they were bought. Paper, cardboard, and three colors of glass can be dumped at various locations all over town – but only Mondays through Saturdays between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. Anything that is too big for my black bin, or grass clippings and green waste that would be too much for my green bin, or anything from the toxic category, needs to go to a collection site within my county. Those are open on three or four days a week, usually for two hours in the afternoon. There may be a fee for dumping certain bulky items, or chemicals, or whatever they feel like charging for.
Where my parents live, the rules are slightly different. Their packaging material will not be collected, so that needs to be dumped at those, always overflowing, dump sites around town. After a while you will find out, when they empty those out – and dump your stuff right afterwards, into empty containers at a semi-clean location.
Can somebody explain to me, how this system is ecologically and economically advantageous? I can’t see the benefit for the environment, if every household spends hours every week driving all over town to get rid of their trash, and maybe that of their parents too.
When I started cutting my own hair about fourty years ago, I had no idea that this particular skill would come in handy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because hairsalons, like many other personal services, have been locked down in an attempt to reduce the number of new infections in Germany, people here are getting anxious.
