Trash

It is 5:00 in the morning. Dark. Cold. I am deep in sleep. And the doorbell rings. Is it a dream? Is it an emergency? Should we ignore it? It rings again, and again. Urgently. Somebody must be in trouble, we have to get up. ("We" means Olof of course).

He stumbles out of bed, into a bathrobe and down the stairs. I wait. It is quiet. Maybe it was a trick and somebody is trying to rob us. But we are in Germany and people are law abiding here, right? Finally, Olof comes straggling up the stairs, chuckling - or is he grumbling?

There was no one there he tells me. Though he caught a fleeting glimpse of man in a reflective vest wandering down the street, pulling out garbage cans from neighboring houses. This was the garbage fairy - the do-gooder citizen who was ringing on our door at an ungodly hour to let us know that we had forgotten to put our trash out!

Well, Germans are nothing if not rule bound. And when it is trash day, don't you forget it. Trash day is not really as easy to remember as it would seem. We were given the schedule for all trash pick-ups for the year when we moved into our house. The trick is to consult it regularly so we do not miss our window of trash collection again. Here there is nothing so simple as "every Wednesday" or even "every other Wednesday", nor do we just have one type of "trash" to look after.

Of course the Germans are to be commended on their recycling programs. Just about everything is sorted and recycled. Very little is actually considered trash actually goes into a landfill.

Plastic and metal go into the yellow container, paper into the blue. Food scraps and green waste into the green bin, and all the rest of the "garbage" goes into the black container. Drink bottles are generally washed and reused. There are standard sizes for beer and soda bottles, and most of these get returned to the drink stores by the case. They are not melted down as in the States. Miscellaneous bottles must be dropped off at separate recycling bins, usually placed near grocery stores.

My kids have become experts on what goes where. Under the sink we have 4 separate bins to sort things, and a very small bag for "trash". It is amazing that our trash can, half the size of what we had in Davis, is only collected twice a month, and is rarely full.

The schedule is very complicated for our black, yellow, blue and green containers. Some are collected twice a month, while others are collected once a month or every 3 to 6 weeks, and some even just twice a year. Since the schedule is not regular, we must consult our little notebook every evening, lest we incur eager bell ringing by our reflective vested friend, whoever he may be.

(Ironically the day I posted this was a black bin trash day, and even though we discussed it the day before, Olof and I both forgot! Luckily the trash fairy came and took our bin to the street for us, yet again)