Any foreigner who moves to Germany has lived through the nightmarish system of trash separation and recycling. The lucky ones among us wake up one day and find they have mastered it. For the others, it remains the closest thing to purgatory this side of hell.
We have applauded it and made fun of it in earlier posts, both reactions are appropriate. For example, if you look through last year's posts, you will find Fruit flies shut down space-age German tech.
Jokes about the German recycling system are a staple of funny, yes, funny, German movies like Fuck you Goethe.
Again, for good reasons.
The most painful trash is plastic and cans because they go into thin yellow plastic bags in most jurisdictions. These bags are as thin as the small transparent fruit and veggie bags you know from supermarkets, except that the yellow trash bags are a hundred times bigger.
A single milk carton edge or, worse, a can with the requisite sharp edge, can and will slice through the flimsy bag either when you carefully take them to the curb or when the collection guy picks it up and energetically throws it towards the truck.
The bag comes with a draw string at the top to securely close it.
The one thing you must never do with the draw string is?
Draw it.
You need to gently peel the string out of the "reinforced" seam and tug it as gently as you tug the blanket around a newborn baby.
If you do it wrong, the whole top separates from the bag and you have two choices, either get some duct tape (yeah) or take the bag and stuff it into a new bag, thus doubling it up.
Which gives you one functioning drawstring.
As it turns out, many Germans, foreigners included in this category for trash purposes, have taken to doubling up as a routine. This and the fact that the original trash Nazis (in the Seinfeld soup sense) have all reached retirement age must be the reasons why we are now getting stronger bags.
This is a big deal, mind you, because the yellow trash bags (as well as the blue ones for paper) used to be strictly rationed, too. You pick up the free bags at designated stores or at town or county offices, and until a few years ago, you had to be prepared to get a stern look if you took more than two rolls, a verbal admonishment for three and an outright "no" for more than three.
Please note that nothing in this post is exaggerated. Seriously.
We once talked to a truck driver in the trash biz, and he told us that he vastly preferred to haul dead animal carcasses and suffer the clinging soap resistant stink of such a load than to distribute clean, pretty yellow bags to the pickup points.
On almost every bag run, someone would insult me if I only delivered, say, half a palette instead of the desired full palette, he told us.
The era of the stronger yellow bag is clear proof of human progress!
[Update 3/29/2016] The latest improvement is to use a trash can instead of bags! But the big issue in the ongoing legislative negotiations is money, billions of Euros sit on German curbs for collection, and cash strapped towns have their eyes on the prize. According to this article, there is clear evidence that communities in several German states use garbage collection as a cash cow - how else can you explain that fees in some regions are several times higher than in others.
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