Before I came to Germany I was already aware that throwing away my rubbish was going to involve a lot of sorting, multi-coloured bins and recycling. Of course nowadays, even back home in the Staffordshire Moorlands one has to sort rubbish for disposal (it’s then remixed when everything is thrown into the same incinerator and burnt, but that’s not the point, you get to feel warm and fuzzy because at least you’ve sorted and “helped the environment”).
In Germany too, the level of recycling varies according to where you live; before I moved to Stuttgart I lived in two places at opposite ends of the recycling scale - Munich, where everything except paper and glass got put in the one bag, and Tübingen where everything was split up (and enforced by neighbours with Henna-coloured hair, who would come to helpfully inform you that they’d checked through your different rubbish bins and noticed that the waste packaging sack contained a yoghurt pot which wan’t completely clean “Look in the indented pattern in the bottom of the pot, there’s still a tiny smear”).
In Stuttgart, there’s a system of recycling which actually works quite well, you get to see it working as well, but it’s not necessarily how it’s planned to work. Sperrmüll - large pieces of waste that don’t fit into the normal bins, such as old bikes, furniture and the like are collected once a year. The council publishes a list of when each street will have Sperrmüll collected and a couple of days before you put your broken video recorder, old skis and no longer wanted Ikea bedside cabinet on the pavement in front of your house. Then, an army of medium sized vans with license plates from Romania, Poland, Bulagaria, Hungary, Bosnia (I’m not trying to stereotype, but none of the trucks I saw were German) will appear and people will sort through what’s available. Anything of value, or which could be repaired gets put in a truck. There’s so much of value that it won’t all fit into the trucks in one go, and people bring armchairs with them, collect a pile of things they want, and whilst the men drive off to unload the van somewhere, a woman is left sitting in the chair, to guard the pile.
Of course, at the end, there’s still a load of “worthless” stuff that the council takes away on the scheduled date, but in the meantime, my video recorder - which has a capacitor in the transformer which blows out about every two weeks, no matter how often I replace it (cost of a new transformer from Loewe in Germany, €300) - has hopefully been repaired and is enjoying a new lease of life in Slovenia.
German Phrase For Today: “Wo kann ich blaues Flaschenglas entsorgen?” - Stop buying prosecco.
Song playing as this was published: Breeders- “Cannonball”
We used to have that Sperrmüll system too but then the AHA Region Hannover changed it and now you have phone and register your refuse and they tell you which day they’re coming. It’s not made public any more which I think is too bad, because so much stuff got recycled the other way by people who, as you say, picked it up beforehand and found a use for it. Now they just throw all the stuff into the truck and crush it.
Christina: That must be a Niedersachsen rule because it’s the same way here, west of the Weser.
IAF: There are probably some proud Slovenian bloggers who are not going to like your remarks
Christina, Karl: I really don’t think it’s a bad system - the stuff really does get re-used - many’s been the time I’ve been walking along and thoughht “I could clean that bike up and sell it on E-bay”. Slovenians (or whoever), merely have a bit more nous to actually organise it properly though - and good luck to whoever does it, it’s literally money lying on the streets! I’ll certainly admit that all the cupboards, shelving and work cabinets in my last garage were care of Spermüll.
Yes, it IS (or was, in our case) a good system. The unspoken rule where we live used to be that if you asked the owners (if they happened to be around
) first, you could take anything you wanted before the Sperrmüll officially got picked up. We got some pretty good stuff - a mirror, bikes, chairs, picture frames etc. all for the asking. I guess you could say that our house is furnished in “Early Sperrmüll”.
Oh, those little old ladies in chairs are the guards, are they? I thought they were just unwanted relatives.
Devonboy: I’m sure that if one offered a decent price for a granny, you might be able to take one off their hands.
The system was certainly very much in evidence in Rostock when I lived there in 95-96, except I don’t remember there being a special date as such you just tended to put things out when you were done with them. I think almost all of us without exception were watching huge 20 year old b/w tellys that we’d picked up somewhere and when I left mine went back into the street and was collected by someone else.
I like the system, it is a good form of recycling because it does tend to mean that only the real Schrott is removed to clog up land fills and the like. I have seen the same appear to happen on certain estates in the Midlands but it’s mostly fly-tipping stuff which is bust to buggery.