Follow The Yellow Sack Road
Yesterday was the first time that I really spent any amount of time thinking about how much effort goes into recycling here. Well, it's a sort of recycling. I'm sure a great number of people are rather surprised when I tell them that the Gelbe Sack is not systematically sorted by the small hands of indigenous third world children. It's taken to a special Gelbe Sack-burning-electricity-generating unit not far from here.
Now don't be surprised but as soon as I mention this to any of our German friends a lengthy discussion entails about how it can't be true, Germany has laws about burning stuff and it must be happening in another country - Poland or even China.
No, honest it is just around the corner (figuratively speaking) and they burn the stuff at a very high temparature. In fact when it first opened they had to import rubbish to burn to keep it operating at optimum performance.
Unusually - well from a British perspective, there appear to be no charity shops. When we took stuff to the Red Cross we went to their office. "If it doesn't fit in the special container just ring the bell and we'll take it, " was the response to our big donation of old clothes.
Susi told me that there were stories that some people - usually Russians - had set up fake bins to collect recycled clothing and then sold all the stuff to Africa. Sounds true if not terrribly profitable. Reinforcing this notion is the constant shipment of old cars from Germany to Africa where the TUF failures can be driven in any condition at all, especially one where the lack of doors, bumpers and lights is not considered essential. It is not uncommon for insurance companies to write-off the cost of a car and the owner can continue to drive it around for another year. They just can't sell it anywhere in Germany. Not that that is a problem, Poland is a short drive from here and the written off car, allegedly can be sold very easily.
As for all the pfand (deposit) on lumps of plastic, well it is not unknown for me to turn up in Aldi's with twenty returnable PET bottles. (happily one can crush them before returning, so they take up less room. Some souls religiously avoid crushing them unaware that the indegenous child (see above) is not refilling them and they end up as - I don't know - plant pots or insulation.) Since the pfand is much higher than the cost of the bottles (C25 pfand to C19) it is not unusual to leave the shop with a pocketful of change that you loaned to them for the hire of the container.
Aldi' s like many other supermarkets has a set of large bins outside the store where customers can dispose of any excess packaging before they take them home. I always remove the frozen chick from the boxes and save myself a few trips to our cellar where all our recycling is stored for... well recycling.
I'm sure that a proper study of all this would demonstrate that more polluting hydro carbons are consumed in this daftness.
Our communal backyard has a compost heap but sadly above the compost heap is a carefully printed official tenants committee sign indicating all the things that you are not allowed to put into the compost heap some of them so ridiculous. No food for example and you mustn't put any sort of meat on it as this will encourage rats. In Britain you buy dried animal blood to boost the compost, I declare proudly. When I observe that no person on the Earth is more than 5 metres away from a rat(at which point Fraser would be bound to say, "Even Anatartica?") this gem of populations studies is recieved with universal disbelief - until we cross the bridge on the Blau near the Xinedom at any time of the day and watch the rats that the Pied Piper so obviously missed, dance along the river bank.
Yesterday was the first time that I really spent any amount of time thinking about how much effort goes into recycling here. Well, it's a sort of recycling. I'm sure a great number of people are rather surprised when I tell them that the Gelbe Sack is not systematically sorted by the small hands of indigenous third world children. It's taken to a special Gelbe Sack-burning-electricity-generating unit not far from here.
Now don't be surprised but as soon as I mention this to any of our German friends a lengthy discussion entails about how it can't be true, Germany has laws about burning stuff and it must be happening in another country - Poland or even China.
No, honest it is just around the corner (figuratively speaking) and they burn the stuff at a very high temparature. In fact when it first opened they had to import rubbish to burn to keep it operating at optimum performance.
Unusually - well from a British perspective, there appear to be no charity shops. When we took stuff to the Red Cross we went to their office. "If it doesn't fit in the special container just ring the bell and we'll take it, " was the response to our big donation of old clothes.
Susi told me that there were stories that some people - usually Russians - had set up fake bins to collect recycled clothing and then sold all the stuff to Africa. Sounds true if not terrribly profitable. Reinforcing this notion is the constant shipment of old cars from Germany to Africa where the TUF failures can be driven in any condition at all, especially one where the lack of doors, bumpers and lights is not considered essential. It is not uncommon for insurance companies to write-off the cost of a car and the owner can continue to drive it around for another year. They just can't sell it anywhere in Germany. Not that that is a problem, Poland is a short drive from here and the written off car, allegedly can be sold very easily.
As for all the pfand (deposit) on lumps of plastic, well it is not unknown for me to turn up in Aldi's with twenty returnable PET bottles. (happily one can crush them before returning, so they take up less room. Some souls religiously avoid crushing them unaware that the indegenous child (see above) is not refilling them and they end up as - I don't know - plant pots or insulation.) Since the pfand is much higher than the cost of the bottles (C25 pfand to C19) it is not unusual to leave the shop with a pocketful of change that you loaned to them for the hire of the container.
Aldi' s like many other supermarkets has a set of large bins outside the store where customers can dispose of any excess packaging before they take them home. I always remove the frozen chick from the boxes and save myself a few trips to our cellar where all our recycling is stored for... well recycling.
I'm sure that a proper study of all this would demonstrate that more polluting hydro carbons are consumed in this daftness.
Our communal backyard has a compost heap but sadly above the compost heap is a carefully printed official tenants committee sign indicating all the things that you are not allowed to put into the compost heap some of them so ridiculous. No food for example and you mustn't put any sort of meat on it as this will encourage rats. In Britain you buy dried animal blood to boost the compost, I declare proudly. When I observe that no person on the Earth is more than 5 metres away from a rat(at which point Fraser would be bound to say, "Even Anatartica?") this gem of populations studies is recieved with universal disbelief - until we cross the bridge on the Blau near the Xinedom at any time of the day and watch the rats that the Pied Piper so obviously missed, dance along the river bank.
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