It's seven in the afternoon, January, subzero Luxembourgish temperatures and I just keep walking and walking towards a remote gas station where, no wonder, buses wouldn't reach.
- I want these plastic recycling bags, I demand after finally making it.
- Only if you have the QR code, they challenge back.
- I do! I even passed the test!
- OK, scan it here, we will give your bags, they succumb, defeated.
Yes, you need to have your plastic waste in specific Luxembourgish bags so that the garbage collector will take a look at them. And, no, these won't be carried outside of the building by whoever does that for the 'normal' bins. YOU have to do it yourself every second Friday because, NO, we don't pick up plastic every week so that YOU will have to live with your plastic garbage for two weeks (or you can avoid all this hassle and just not recycle plastic and save everyone's time?, I hear them saying)
Fast backwards five years, Austria, the Hausmeister is showing me around the garbage area :
- This bin is for the general waste and this one for the paper.
- OK, but where is the plastic one?
- The plastic one?, he wonders rather perplexed. I don't know, maybe you will find it somewhere on the street. But this is the one for the paper recycling, very important to chuck your 'Altpapier' in it, he insists.
Finally, there was indeed a relevant bin a couple of minutes away from the building with the setup being quite similar in Germany; the only difference was that I had to walk into a nearby building which did have this sought after bin and, sneakily, (because tenants over there might had been rather unpleased with random people accessing their premises just to throw their rubbish), do the needed.
Just a few years even more backwards, Malta: Plastic recycling? Of course, we collect it twice a week from everywhere. Paper? yeah, maybe, we are not really sure how and when...
So what basically happens is:
In Malta, plastic can be a real problem since it takes ages to disintegrate so it will end up getting the landfill mountain even higher. Leave aside the fact that we have all seen plastic floating in our seas, which is just ugly. Who cares about paper? we don't even have forests....
- In Austria etc, we do have forests and, regardless if the paper we are using is coming from our trees or not, we just want to feel that we are protecting these. Plastic is not our issue, we will just dig it in somewhere or let the river take to the sea... we are not an island or something...
In a nutshell, globally, countries are supposed to be spending several billions on climate and nature preservation projects but, apparently, they cannot even agree on what is more important to be recycled and what is not, so they just do whatever.. leave aside that all these are in the eu with strong common policies, europarliament etc...
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