Recycling

When I first arrived in Australia somebody proudly presented their recycling bin saying something about being a developped & environmental friendly country. Well, this person obviously didn't know that Swiss people possess a recycling gene on chromosome 32.

History already showed that we are heroes when it comes to recycling. An old apple for example is not just thrown away. No, it is used to be shot from our sons' heads with a crossbow. This is as true now as it was 700 years ago. Not that we still shoot apples from our children's heads of course but we don't throw out things mindlessly when it could still be used for another purpose.

Compared to Queensland, where each house has one recycling bin in which all recycling material goes together, Switzerland wants to collect their stuff already separated. And with separated I mean separated. Aluminium for example is collected separately from tin. Glass is not just glass, no, there are containers for white glass, green glass and brown glass (you can imagine my dilemma each time one of our blue drinking glasses breaks!) It's not only that the different materials need to be separated but also material from different locations do. As you'd imagine it is not possible to have bins for all these separate material for each house, so we need to bring our stuff to dedicated places in the area. I once dared to take mine to a recycling place in Zurich, with a non-Zurichese car. I saw that woman stopping and watching me intensely. I waited. So did she. After a while I got a bit annoyed and asked her if she's waiting for something in particular. She said that it is forbidden to deposit your waste in a different area and that often those people deposit their bags there without emptying them. Although I don't like lying in general I wanted to get out there quickly, which made me say that I'd know what she meant, that this was my boyfriend's car and I'd live just around the corner (which I actually did...once...well, ok, five years ago.) This made her happy - and very talkative. It's quite funny how Swiss people can be so close and silent but when it comes to complaining about others... (So much for 'getting out there quickly')

Of course there are still other things to recycle. Paper, for example, is nicely bound to handy packages, which school kids will collect about 4 times a year with their Leiterewage (that's the romantic version - nowadays it's usually men with trucks). Cardboard is yet another story. And of course there is the world famous story about putting confidential papers into locked containers, which can turn out to be quite costly if the wrong people - for example security - can access them before they get shredded.

Although I fully support the concept of recycling I was a bit astonished the other day when I observed one of my work mates emptying his punch hole into the confidential paper bin. Poor guy who needs to shred those tiny bits!

Vera Kaufmann, 3. August 2004