Europe – thinking twice about the garbage

The International Herald Tribune has run an interesting and quite extensive piece on variable rate charging (pay-as-you-throw).



The most notable thing about garbage in the picture-perfect medieval city [of Zurich] is that it‘‘s nearly impossible to find any. On Untere Zaune, a winding cobbled street in Zurich‘‘s historic old town, household trash is collected just once a week with the precision of a military strike, from 7 to 9 a.m. on Fridays. Just after 7, the curbs are busy with residents and business employees putting out a white plastic Zuri-Sack or two.



This is the city‘‘s official, and costly, trash bag, which must be purchased from the government at about 5 Swiss francs, or $4.25 apiece, depending on size. It seems impossible that, in a whole week, humans living in the 21st century have produced so little refuse.



"I have a special room where I keep garbage until it‘‘s the right day," said Marianne Schlaepfer, a Christian minister at a hospital, leaving a Zuri-Sack by the curb across from an ancient church.



"The program is tough but you get used to it. It does make you think more about garbage and the environment."



In Europe, household waste is increasing by 10 percent every five years despite calls by nearly all governments to reduce it. At current rates, the amount of paper, glass and plastic waste will be up by as much as 60 percent in 2010 compared with the 1990s, according to the Association of Cities and Regions for Recycling, or ACRR, a nongovernmental organization in Brussels.



But here in Zurich, as in a few other parts of Europe, draconian disposal and recycling programs in place for more than a decade have dramatically reversed the trend.



Household trash in Zurich has decreased overall by 40 percent since 1992, said Alfred Borchard, logistics manager of the city‘‘s Waste and Recycling Bureau. Zurich power plants that used to burn local trash to make electricity now burn garbage from Germany instead.



To achieve this, residents like Schlaepfer have learned to live with complicated incentives for people not to create garbage, from the mandatory use of Zuri-Sacks for trash disposal to a byzantine collection schedule that allows paper and cardboard to be discarded only once a month each (on different days), and most other types of trash even less often.



In Paris, Rome and New York, where the rumble of garbage trucks is like background music and collection happens frequently, it is easy to toss things casually into the trash can. Zurich, in contrast, has made throwing things away nearly impossible and also costly.



"They‘‘ve turned us all into recyclists!" said Florian Eidenbenz, 40, a sound engineer who on a recent day rode his bicycle a kilometer to a recycling center by the lazy Limmat River in the center of town to dispose of his family‘‘s bottles.



Separating them by color, since fines are high, Eidenbenz added: "You learn to cope because it reduces waste and garbage. I mean it‘‘s clever: When they charge so much for Zuri-Sacks, you think twice putting things into the garbage."



Zurich started charging for garbage bags in 1992. Within a year, household trash began decreasing from 140,000 tons a year citywide to 100,000, today‘‘s level.



In a survey by the ACRR of several dozen cities in northern Europe, only a few small cities in Austria and Holland produced less trash per person.



The average Zurich family produces just one Zuri-Sack a week.



It is hard to compare figures on household waste, since countries tend to "measure it differently," said Francis Radermaker, executive director of the Brussels-based recycling association. The average European generates 540 kilograms, or 1,190 pounds, of waste a year, according to the Wuppe