At first I continued picking up the toys, puzzle pieces and papers scattered across the living room carpet, until somewhere in the remote recesses of my mind something clicked. I suddenly looked up. “That’s not the…” I said to no one in particular. I broke off mid-sentence and paused to listen more intently to what was definitely the not-too-distant roar of a large truck.
My son looked up from the school book he was reading to question, “What?”
But I sprang to my feet and didn’t answer. I ran down the hall and grabbed my shoes out of my bedroom. As I slipped them on while hopping alternately from one foot to the next, I peered out the window and through the neighbor’s bushes and between branches for a glimpse of the approaching truck. “It is!” I exclaimed after spotting it and sprinted back down the hall and out the front door. I hopped down the front steps and looked frantically toward the end of the driveway. “Oh man! It’s not there,” I said to myself.
I turned and ran back up the steps, through the front door, across the entryway and back into the living room. I threw open the large glass patio door (probably a bit too recklessly, I might add) and ran for the large, wheeled, green can that was sitting in the grass at the edge of the back patio. My son again asked, “What, Mom? What is it?” as I ran past.
I yelled, “The garbage truck!” over my shoulder as I went out the door.
In Germany, everything is limited and expensive which includes the curbside garbage collection service. This was a bit of a shock coming from the land of limitless landfills and garbage galore! America is incredibly wasteful and quite the disposable society in comparison. You just don’t realize this until you leave and go somewhere else. In our hometown, for example, we can put out as many garbage cans as we want to each week. As many as we want! And the garbage truck will haul it all away and at no extra charge! If you happen to be out of town or miss the garbage collection one week, no worries; you just pile it all out there the next week and it all disappears.
This is not so in Germany. We were allotted one green compost can and one black garbage can and they were only emptied at the curb every other week on alternate weeks. And every time the garbage can was emptied, we were charged for it. This charge was on top of a substantial garbage collection fee charged per house. Thus, you paid in advance for garbage service whether you ever used it or not. And the more you disposed of, the more expensive it became.
Let me just say, that money can be a great motivator. We suddenly became avid recyclers. And actually, it wasn’t too difficult to do. We didn’t have to invest in expensive gadgets. We simple set down four medium sized boxes next to the garbage can in the kitchen, called the children and explained the rules; One box for plastics, one box for paper, cardboard and paper, one box for glass and one box for metal cans. We didn’t drink soda pop except very occasionally in our home so we didn’t worry about aluminum cans.
Our home recycling system was quite simple and this was the beauty of it. We had tried to do some recycling back in our home state and it was so complicated, it was inhibiting. They only took green glass every other week and clear glass but not white. They would take certain kinds of plastics but not others which seemed to require a chemical engineering degree to tell the difference, and so on and so forth it went.
It was amazing to us when you broke the garbage down into these four simple categories (paper, plastic, glass and metal) how much of our garbage was recyclable. Almost everything we bought came in some kind of paper/plastic packaging combination. If we had just recycled those two items alone, we still would have cut down our amount of household garbage tremendously. By additionally recycling the glass and metal cans we astonished ourselves that we only produced about two tall kitchen bags full of garbage each week. And at the time we were a family of six with one in disposable diapers!!!
I glanced over the bush tops, onto the street and saw the garbage truck was just two houses away as I grabbed the green can and began half wheeling it and half dragging it across the grass and over to the back gate leading to the driveway. Sweating, I shoved it through the gate and wheeled it down the cobblestone driveway. Then I launched the can out into the street just as the truck was driving past. I turned and started walking back to the front porch as I heard the loud squeaking of brakes.
I looked back down the driveway just as the surprised garbage men jumped off the truck and looking a bit perplexed one of them commenced into rapid German. I had no idea what he was saying. At this moment, I felt desperately rude and hopelessly inadequate. I did the only thing I could; I smiled sheepishly and then shrugged. Right then I so wished I knew the German words for I’m sorry. I’m not sure they understood my situation and I don’t think my non-verbal communication appeased them as the guy that had been speaking threw his hands into the air and then made (what I found out later) to be an obscene gesture with his hands. I imitated his hopeless shrug, turned and continued walking back toward the house. Thankfully, they did finally empty my compost garbage can and moved on down the road in their truck. I’m still not sure what they said to me and, honestly, I’m probably better off not knowing.
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