Each week here in Switzerland, we go down the road to the local Déchetterie (dump) to dispose of our week’s garbage. The “sorting of the garbage” ritual is more than just a weekly chore. It is a window unto the Swiss soul.
To begin, it makes practical Swiss sense to dedicate as little space as possible to landfill in a country with so little arable land. The Swiss can’t just truck their garbage to Michigan, like so many other places do. So instead they enlist their citizenry to gather weekly at each town’s pre-determined site to sort things down to the last wrapper. This level of practicality and precision is very Swiss.
Just how precise? Taxonomically speaking, the family garbage is divided into glass, paper, metal, plastic, compost. This is pretty standard for any progressive city. But in Switzerland there is further subdivision of the garbage right down to sub-species. Plastic is sorted into clear plastic, wrapper plastic, colored bottle plastic, and green plastic. Glass is similarly separated into bins designated by color. Any container with a metal cap must have it removed, with the cap sorted into yet another container. The strict separation of paper products borders on OCD.
For the privilege of doing this hauling and sorting ourselves, citizens in our town pay a 55% municipal tax rate, considered one of the most attractively low in the country. And while it is not strictly mandatory to go to the Déchette, it is nonetheless highly incentivized. The alternative curbside pickup requires the use of garbage bags specially stamped with the name of our town. A roll of 20 stamped garbage bags costs $30. It doesn’t take a math genius to deduce that it is far more affordable to join the Déchetterie ritual.
And the ritual is surprisingly community-building. The Déchetterie is only open for 5 hours a week (2 hours Tuesday afternoon, 3 hours Saturday afternoon), also very Swiss. So there is a very good chance of meeting some or all of our neighbors there. There is a sense of pride is doing our civic duty, and witnessing everyone else doing the same. Friendly greetings are exchanged over armloads of tin cans. Discretion is widely practiced in the face of vast volumes of empty liquor bottles coming from neighbor’s cars. There are understanding nods as each empty bottle is meticulously recycled according to its color.
The town retirees are drawn to the Déchetterie for its social aspects. They mill about as gossips and gatekeepers, helpfully instructing newcomers on the finer points of acid vs. lithium battery separation. And they invariably have bottles of wine on the go, even the paid municipal worker who is theoretically in charge. The other week, with the mountains framing her in the background, we saw a lady in a full fur coat sipping champagne from a fluted glass near the compost bins. To add to the ambience, the local militia unit was taking rifle practice at the range just behind the Déchetterie, their gunfire adding a finishing Swiss touch to this caricaturish Swiss scene.
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[Image Credit to Montreal Gazette]
Those of us who have been here a while now organise our lives around dechetterie opening hours… the one little upside to having our weekend to the UK cancelled due to snow the other week was that we would be able to go to the dechetterie after all. This must be a sign we are becoming naturalised Swiss…?