Swiss trash

Have I ever mentioned that Swiss trash is complicated and very serious?

This is random, but important for any person living here.  Plus, this is a daily part of our life now.

For the first 6 months, we were trying to figure out how things worked.  As a true American, we threw away almost everything in a trashcan.  But as a disclaimer, living in the Portland area, we improved at our recycling skills since they made it easy to recycle.

Here, you don't pay a utility or trash bill.  You buy official trash bags that comply with the area in which you live.  They're 18 Swiss francs for 10 bags (35 L....which is almost half the size of a kitchen trashcan in the USA.  You can also buy 60L bags, but no one has a 60 L trashcan in their house here.  With this whole buy-your-own-bags thing, you want to put the least amount of trash in one bag, which means it encourages you to recycle anything and everything that you can.  However, that can be quite inconvenient.

At the grocery store, there's a recycling center that looks just like this (below).  You can recycle plastic bottles including PET, batteries, light bulbs, CDs, and cleaning bottles like detergent and soap.  BUT, you cannot recycle plastic egg containers or plastic fruit containers (think strawberries) here.  I think they probably put the NOTICE sign up for me at our grocery store because I was always throwing all my plastic stuff in there.

(image)

Maddie sometimes helps me sort through our trash.  So fun!....

There are specific days a month when the cardboard/paper trash guys pick up at our apartment dumpsters.  We still don't know those and just carefully watch when people start to set these things out.  As for cardboard and paper, people neatly flatten, pile, and tie with a specific twine and leave out for the guys to pick up.

There are local recycling centers for different colored glass which you must drive/walk/bike to in order to recycle your glass and aluminum/metal cans.

This glass station also has a textile recycling bin.

There's also a "Brocki" or "Brockenhaus" in almost every town which is like a Goodwill.  They also have Salvation Army here.

I haven't even mentioned the green trash.  You are supposed to recycle compost as well.  Our apartment came with a trash cabinet with 3 different trash bins, one large, one small, and another small green one.  There's a specific dumpster for the green trash.

We have lived here for a year and are in a pretty good routine now.  But it's still not convenient.  It's especially inconvenient when most people live in smaller apartments and have to store all this trash to recycle.  It's true, you can be lazy and still throw everything away, but we have been extra careful to do everything correct after reading a little more about waste management here....some facts below that shock me:

Since the introduction of landfilling ban (landfill ban?! I guess it makes sense with how little land there is in Switzerland, but it's not like they have less trash here...) in Switzerland on 1. January 2000 all non recycled combustible waste must be incinerated. Switzerland disposes of 28 municipal solid waste incinerating facilities (April 2011) (I guess there's no problem with toxic fumes?)

In many places in Switzerland, household rubbish disposal and collection is charged for. Household refuse (except dangerous and cumbersome items, batteries, sofas, electrical appliances etc.) in theory, is only to be collected if it is in bags which either have a payment sticker attached, in official bags with the surcharge paid when the bags are purchased or weighed at central collection bins. However in practice, this is difficult to enforce, for hygiene reasons and difficulty in identifying the perpetrators. However it is a financial incentive to recycle as much as possible, for recycling is usually free of charge or cheaper, albeit not always operated through a door-to-door collection. Swiss health officials and police often open up garbage for which the disposal charge has not been paid (yes, you just read that right...law enforcement goes through our trash when we don't abide by the trash rules!). They search for evidence such as old bills which connect the bag to the household/person they originated from. Fines for not paying the disposal fee can now be up to CHF 10'000.- in some municipalities.

The recycling rates of the individual recyclable materials reached in 2006 a mean of 76% of all currently recyclable items being recycled.[5] This has narrowly surpassed the Swiss government's 75% target... (this is all very crazy yet very impressive coming from the USA where only in some areas is it really common to recycle, and even in those areas, it's mainly just plastics and glass, and sometimes you even have to pay to recycle)