Trash talk

Disposing trash in a new place is not something you think of before you move there. I did read about the extreme recycling that takes place in Sweden from an  American perspective before I got here. Now that I am here, after the initial hesitancy, it seems to make sense.

I had been a community gardner in my town for four months before moving to Sweden. I participated in turning compost pile(a stinky and labor intensive process) just once. It took me the next three months to get rid of my shoulder and arm pain. A key ingredient to composting other than back breaking labor is kitchen waste. I started collecting vegetable and fruit peels and instead of tossing it in trash, added it to the compost pile in the garden. This reduced the frequency of trash that I set on the curbside from twice a week to once every three weeks. Yes, I do use a lot of vegetables and prepare them from scratch.

Back to Sweden. There are 6 bins in the buildings courtyard. There are only three apartments in the building, including us. I stayed away from the bins for as long as I could. I checked with a colleague as to what each box represented. He told me that it varies from each city and neighborhood and he is used to 8 different bins. I guess I was in a better situation.

I had made the big decision of leaving everything familiar behind to move to a new country for a new challenge. Sorting trash was not going to discourage me.

I surveyed the trash cans before taking the trash out. The brown one was for vegetable waste. The cart comes with a picture of an apple core. The laundry room had brown paper bags with the same logo and name as the brown cart. There are 4 blue carts. One for paper, carton and cardboard waste, another for plastic waste- containers and wrappers, the third one for clear glass and the last blue one for colored glass. Since we don't drink, that is one bin we will not use. The sixth is the green bin and that I assume takes care of the rest, that cannot be recycled or composted. There were stickers with pictures on all the bins. The words were all Swedish but that is why they say a picture speaks a thousand words. It helped to open each bin to see what was already inside. The first time I mixed the kitchen waste with general trash and put it in the green box. I separated paper and cardboard waste and placed them in plastic bags as instructed and put them in their right boxes.

Now that I have figured out what goes where, I need to make trash separation in the apartment more efficient. Vegetable waste now goes in the brown bag and will be placed at least twice a week in the brown bin. (I still use a lot of vegetables from scratch). I have one unlined bin for paper and plastic waste which will bagged separately when it is time to dispose them. And finally a lined bin for all other trash, which hopefully will not need disposal very frequently.

That is enough trash talk.