Tübingen has a reputation as being a “green” city, meaning there is a lot of emphasis on saving energy and the like. One of the consequences is that we do a lot of recycling here.

Now, when we first moved to Tübingen and somebody told me that we’d have to get used to all the recycling, I thought to myself, hey, no big deal — I’m used to recycling. After all, more than 20 years ago we were taking back bottles to the supermarket to redeem the “deposit” on them when we lived in Iowa City. Later, when we lived in California, we separated out plastics and papers and yard waste, long before a lot of our relatives were doing that in their states.

Later still, in Italy, we not only separated paper, plastic and glass (each to be deposited into the appropriate bins on the street near our apartment), but we also had a brown plastic Biomüll container for food waste. The city periodically would deliver brown paper bags to every home that you would place into the (also provided) at-home brown plastic containers. Once the bags were filled with food waste, you deposited the bags in special Biomüll bins near the apartment.

BTW, the brown paper bags were not leak proof; lifting filled ones out of the plastic bin while in the kitchen had potentially disastrous results. FWIW, in Bolzano at that time you could buy a kitchen sink rug for only $2.00 if you needed to replace yours in a hurry after an unforeseen Biomüll disaster.  I’m just saying.

Anyway, after all that experience, I thought how complicated could the recycling in Tübingen really be? Heck, in Bolzano we even used the German name for that Biomüll (food waste) bin. I figured we were pros.

But … I figured wrong.

Interestingly, in my German language class 2 years ago one of the first topics in the book we were using (aimed at foreigners living in Germany) was an entire chapter on how to recycle. We’ll start today, class, with a list of the recycling categories for how to separate stuff into different bins/piles in Germany:

• Paper (paper products, e.g. newspaper, cereal boxes, other wrapping paper, paper sheets, etc.). There big bins for papers in the back of our building where we take our stuff; these bins get put out by the building caretaker for collection by the city on the appropriate days.
• Cardboard – no bins to put these in, but you can put them out yourself on the correct date (the schedule for everything is posted inside our lobby). You cannot leave them next to bins behind the building (there was a special memo issued by our landlord against that).
• Gelb (literally “yellow”) so-named, I assume, for the color of the plastic bag you use to put this type in. In this bag you collect containers (metal or plastic), and/or packaging of any type that isn’t paper, cardboard or glass. These plastic bags are available for free from the city hall, but you have to pick them up yourself. Our building allows us to pile these yellow bags up in the back of the building, and then the caretaker puts them out on the correct days.
• Biomüll  (food waste). We have a plastic bin under the sink, just like we had in Italy, where we gather this food stuff. Unlike in Italy, the city does not provide any free bags for this, though, so we have to buy biodegradable bags ourselves.
• Bottles that have a deposit (e.g. soda bottles, water bottles, ), which can be plastic or glass. You need to take these to a store that handles them, such as a supermarket, where you use their special machine to get a receipt for your refund. You can then cash in the refund for money, or just use it to purchase more stuff at the supermarket.
• Containers made of glass: any glass bottle that don’t have a deposit need to be taken to the glass recycling bins, which are only located in a few parts of town. Luckily, the one near us is only a 5 minute walk away. There, you need to sort your glass by color:
  • white (most jars)
  • green (most wine bottles)
  • brown (most beer bottles)
• Big and/or odd and ends stuff,  including things like pots, pans, old hair dryers, electronics, clothes, furniture, large metal objects: you need to take these things to special “other stuff” collection points.
  
• Restmüll (literally “the rest of the trash) – anything that doesn’t belong in any other categories and isn’t too big can be put into a Restmüll container. We collect these in bags in our apartment and put them in bins behind the building, which the caretaker puts out for city collection.

Now, the list is long, but maybe you’re thinking it all makes sense?

Well, no, not always. Everyday there’s at least one thing I’m not sure about, and I wind up guessing where to put it. I should note that there are penalties for getting this wrong, so I need to try to guess well. There are trash police who come by and spot-check your trash. It’s true. Our building got a letter from the landlord back in October saying we (as a building) had put out too much Restmüll, perhaps because there were things in there that shouldn’t have been. If we (as a building) continued like that, the city would force us to pay more each month for the Restmüll pickup.

BTW, I would like to point out that Chris and I were out of the country during the time period in question, so I at least know that my arbitrary decisions about where to put items did not cause that particular problem.

Our building also got fined, or cited, or something, last year for having the wrong stuff in the Biomüll. It’s a pretty tricky to get that right, apparently, since the Biomüll is not merely food waste, it’s bio-degradable food waste. The rest of the food waste goes into the Restmüll. The bags you use for the Biomüll also have to be special bio-degradable ones, too, which cost a small fortune; the system in Italy was easier, since they provided the right bags. On the up side, though, the plastic ones I buy here are a bit sturdier.

Once you have the right bags, you need to get the contents right. One of my German teachers told a story about how her building was once fined for putting tea bags into the Biomüll. Apparently, technically, only the tea goes into the Biomüll; the bag and tag parts are supposed to go into the Restmüll. The tea can’t go into the Restmüll, though, only the bag can. Since opening and separating tea bags is not something that people typically do, most often people put the whole bag into the Biomüll and hope they don’t get caught (my teacher and her fellow building-dwellers apparently drank so much tea that all the tea bags in the Biomüll caught the attention of the inspector, though).

So getting the sorting done right is a big issue around here. Of course, I had to laugh at the approach the University took with the trash in Chris’ office building last year. Chris had two trash bins in his office for separating out different kinds of trash (paper and Restmüll). It used to be the case that the janitor, when cleaning the offices, would take these individual bins down to the central room to empty them. However, apparently not everybody was as diligent as Chris about sorting their trash properly. So, a memo came out that said from now on, the janitors would not be emptying the trash cans in the offices. Rather, each person would have to take their own trash cans down to the central bins themselves.

Now, let’s think about that for a moment. The problem was that people weren’t separating their trash properly in their own offices. So, the “solution” was to make these same people put their trash directly into the central bins? Doesn’t that mean that the central bins are likely now not properly sorted? I’m not following the logic there.

Of course, I also don’t get the logic behind what you have to get rid of those “other stuff” items. For everything but clothing, you have to take those other-stuff items to a collection place on the outskirts of town. That’s not easy to do on a bike, or by bus, or on foot, since we’re talking about heavy and/or awkward electronic items, furniture, pots, pans, etc. Which means you have to drive there to recycle them.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t having to drive to recycle seem to defeat part of that “green” energy-saving effort of recycling in the first place? I’m just saying.

Since we don’t have a car, we’re piling up an eclectic assortment of stuff that will need to be taken out to that “other stuff” area someday. Everytime I catch sight of our pile, this old Fats Waller song pops into my head:

Save up all your pots and pans
Save up everything little thing you can
Don’t give it away,
Get some cash for your trash. Yeah.
— from the song Cash for your trash by Thomas “Fats” Waller

Unfortunately, Tübingen being a green city doesn’t refer to that kind of green. 😉