Taste the Waste

I. Trash sorting

Germany has the most developed, compartmentalized, and effective trash and recycling systems I've ever seen.  Some categories are self-explanatory, like 'papier' and 'glass', while other major categories required some personal research:  I asked Irene, who conversed with me about the whole trash system for half an hour, then quizzed me.  The Germans just know how to separate every used tissue, yogurt container, chocolate bar wrapper, glass bottle and its plastic, metal, or cork top, apple core, t-bone, egg shell, milk carton, broken light bulb, used-up pen, broken chair leg, etc etc.  No, they do not and should not go into the same bin.

Here are some major categories, and some accompanying visuals from the gated (must be unlocked with my building key, unless someone left it unlocked) trash community in my parking lot (yes, I took pictures of the trash bins outside my Wohnheim, it was a Saturday morning, no one saw, probably)

Papier - self-explanatory, don't include dirty food containers or used tissues, blue containers

Glass - also self-explanatory, except don't put the bottles you paid a Flaschepfand for if you want your Pfand back.  See 'Drinks' below.

Yellow with green - most materials can go in here.  Most plastic, foil, and foam packaging materials, including those for food (even milk cartons and the foil or plastic wrappers from candy bars), cans, composite materials, bottle caps, emptied deodorant, .  The acceptable items are not listed on the outside, so this bin is the least intuitive.  But, it's important to do this right and not squish in here food scraps and things that actually cannot be recycled because this category gets sorted by hand.

Biocompost - ('bio' is pronounced like "BO") - all your food scraps, most people put used tissues and paper towels here, depending on their composition.  Not all places have this bin, as it is the messiest and stinkiest and attracts large populations of small flying creatures.  In that case, this stuff goes into Restmüll.

Restmüll - the rest, everything that cannot decompose or be recycled and hazardous materials.  Think used diapers, tape, paint, broken wires and cables, old lipstick, etc.

Batteries should not go into any of these bins, there are stores that collect them up front.


Now for the 7th compartmentalization of waste:

Drinks!

Most drinks come in a Pfandflasche, that is a Flasche (bottle, think flask) for which you have paid a Pfand (deposit).  You pay 25 cents per plastic bottle, usually 8 cents per glass bottle.  You can retrieve your Flaschepfand from your Pfandflaschen by feeding the Pfandautomat located towards the front of most grocery stores and then bringing the receipt to the cashier.  This is not a new concept if you've been to and drank in Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticutt, Vermont, New York, Oregon, Iowa, Michigan, or California, but I've never paid more then 10 cents deposit in any of those states, and rarely more than 5 cents.  The incentive to return the bottles to a recycling center is therefore nowhere as high, and those of us without convenient transportation or a large repository of empty containers to tap into will pitch each fully or half-consumed Gateroade into mixed recycling or the trash, whichever bin is closest .  The deposit here is significant and you will be offended if someone takes your empty bottle from you without permission.  A 6 pack of 1.5L bottles of water costing 19 cents each will cost more than double if I don't retrieve my Flaschepfand (that's 1.14 € for the water and 1. 50 € deposit, mental math for Valhalla bartenders).

Courtesy of Youtube.  Feed bottles to the machine one at a time.  The machine spins it around inside and scans it to make sure it meets criteria for a 'Pfandflasche'.  You can't just put any bottle in here.  I therefore keep my receipts which indicate which containers a paid the Pfand for.  Press that green button when you're done for the slip with the total deposit that you can collect.  I chose this video for the anomalous hairstyle.

Last note on an effective deposit system: most stands serving drinks at markets and festivals, and many bars as well, charge a Pfand for the cup or glass you get your drink in.  Depending on the size and novelty of the cup, it's 1-2.50 €.  Of course you get it back when you return your empty cup, but you also have the option of keeping it if you like it, no hard feelings.


Now to the namesake of this posting:

II.  "Taste the Waste"

"Taste the Waste" is a documentary by German director by Valentin Thurn calling attention to the amount of food we throw away worldwide, often without ever selling it.  Farmers, stockers, shippers, and supervisors of supermarkets, members of research organizations, dumpster divers, volunteers of soup kitchens, and some customers were interviewed from Germany, France, the UK, the USA, Cameroon, and Japan.  I viewed this documentary with Martin in an older theater in the inner city of Mainz.  He was kind enough to whisper translations of the more crucial moments of the non-English interviews for me (subtitles were German).

Inside the theater, the walls were covered with floral wall paper and the screen was covered by a hanging red curtain with thick gold ribbon trim.

The visual film itself effectively and powerfully illustrated the massive excess in which food is produced in according to the rules of mass food production formed to meet the predicted expectations of the consumers.  Unopened packages of food were carted off six days before the expiration date stamped on them as costumers were not expected to buy then, then scanned as they were placed into the dumpster.  Chefs at the grocery store in Japan delicately assembled sushi rolls and aligned them neatly in their closed to-go containers, which receive a sticker that show not only the expiration date, but also the expiration hour.  Sushi packages are doomed within three hours of their expiration hour, gigantic bags of unopened sushi piled around dumpsters filled the next frames.  The European Union once imposed a regulation for selling only straight cucumbers; they fit nicely into boxes and packages, they don't think customers should like bendy cucumbers.  Regulations in the US demand farmers to produce specific sizes of melons, tomatoes, peppers, etc to fit the compartmentalized size scale for the supermarkets, any sizes between small and medium or medium and large will be thrown away if they're delivered to the store.  Most German bakeries have 20% excess of baked goods at any given time.  They must have a sufficient stock of all kinds of rolls at any one time; running out is not an option for those who run the shop to avoid consequences from the franchise.  The result is a forklift pouring a waterfall of rolls and loaves that never made it to the front of the shop into dumpsters.  According to the film, the cumulative amount of food thrown away from the EU and North America over a year could supply the impoverished people with three times the food needed in that amount of time.

Valentin Thurn was present at the theater and took questions from the audience after the film.



“Taste the Waste“ — the trailer from tastethewaste.com on Vimeo.

I don't believe and I don't believe the director thinks large scale food production isn't necessary to feed the populace.  The film wasn't perfect, but nonetheless took a provocative look at the massive economical and environmental consequences of the system when it comes to producing more than the market consumes as well as the disconnects between producers and distributors.  Bananas from Cameroon, for example, are too expensive for most household in Cameroon to have one a day, yet they're pitched at supermarkets they're shipped to in the EU if they're not at the perfect level of under-ripeness.  There is no easy solution or replacement to the system, excessive habits of consumers feed the cycles of the market and vice versa.  At the individual and household level, we can evaluate our lifestyles and become more flexible in the kinds and amounts of foods we buy and their packaging.

Lastly, I'm disturbed by the bunches of Bio (EU equivalent of certified organic) bananas in cellophane at Aldi.  My (and my old roommate's) boyfriend says it perfectly:

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