Recycling

Well I think just about everyone now has got the hang of recycling household waste, or at least we know we should. Actually putting it in the recycling container is where some of us slip up! There is a debate going on in the UK at the moment over how rubbish should be paid for. Should it carry on being part of the Council Tax or should there be some new way of measuring household waste?

When we moved to Switzerland we just presumed it was the same as the UK until someone told us we would have to buy the appropriate colour stickers for our bin bags according to the capacity of the bag. If they didn't have a sticker they didn't get taken. Things have changed slightly now in that you actually buy the official bags so they all look the same, rather than having to buy different stickers for different bags and working out if you had put the correct one on. So in effect we pay for the volume of waste that we put out to be collected.

This immediately made us much more careful in what we threw out and what we collected to be taken to the recycling depots. Our rubbish went down enormously when we moved here. Part of that is due to the fact that we buy almost all of our fruit and vegetables from the market, reusing bags from the last time. But mostly it is down to the fact that it is blatantly obvious that if we didn't recycle what we could we would have to pay for about 3 times the amount of bags that we currently do.

We use 35 litre bags and usually put out only one a week. We have a compost bin in the garden for all our raw food waste. I used to put cooked food in it too, but someone told me that wasn't right and also no dairy. Please correct me if I've got that wrong!
We have a big green bucket for garden waste which is collected 1-2 times per month depending on the time of year. We have a paper collection every 2 weeks which has to be bundled neatly with the right sort of string! There is also a metal collection 2 times a year for everything from tin cans to bike frames.

Most supermarkets, even the tiny local ones, have a glass, PET plastic, milk plastic (white bottles) and battery collection point. And in the last year or so local recycling points have been springing up consisting of what looks like pedal bins in the ground with a huge underground container. The children love watching these being emptied as the lorry lifts them right out of their hole and high into the air to be emptied into the lorry.

I must confess that it did take me a while to get used to the idea of taking some recycling with me every time I visited the shops, but when it started dramatically constricting the floor space in our hall I found it easier to remember.

There are also regular clothes collections done by charities. There are not so many charity shops here as in the UK so perhaps this is why the collections work so well. I remember when we used to get one of the bags put through our door in Scotland we hardly ever put anything in it and didn't notice many on the streets on collection day either. But here most houses manage to find something to donate.

Something else that happens here is that if people have things that they no longer need, and perhaps not enough, or not good enough quality to sell, then they just put them outside on the wall with a sign saying 'GRATIS'/'FREE' and people can help themselves. I've seen bookcases, books, chairs, kitchen implements, crockery, ornaments and all sorts of other oddments. And they all get taken eventually.

When we left the UK there were no door to door recycling collections. We could take paper to the supermarket to be recycled but cardboard was not allowed. Glass was pretty easy to recycle, but I had never seen a metal collection and only a few places for drinks bottles, but no other sort of plastic. I believe it has changed a lot in the last couple of years and I would love to hear how it compares to what we have in Switzerland and how people think it could be improved. Please leave a comment!