Simon Butcher

Bruxelles-Propreté et la confusion aux verre

Posted
Comments 4

Louis from Bruxelles-PropretéMeet Louis: Ordinarily he works for Bruxelles-Propreté, the garbos here in Brussels. Louis is an incredibly busy man since he started his second job with Nintendo as the half-brother of Mario. Unfortunately, this has left Louis little time to properly communicate with plebeians with regard to how garbage should be handled.

Lately, Louis and his team of public relations boffins have decided to attempt rectification of their past communications that disappeared silently — They have attempted to convey to the great-unwashed how glass should be recycled. In order to tailor the message to the masses, they've decided it's a good idea to treat everyone like children.

For those who don't know, here in Brussels we place our garbage out on the street in regulation bags. These bags come in four colours, depending on what they're designed to contain: A white bag for normal waste, a yellow bag for paper and cardboard, a green bag for garden waste, and finally a contentious blue bag for plastic, metal, cartons, and maybe glass.

Ick!
Ick! The blue PMC bag doesn't digest everything.
Over the last few weeks, Brussels has been hit with a full-blown media assault regarding this blue bag, from print to radio, and even announcements in supermarkets! Each one follows a similar theme — the garbage bags “eat” garbage, but certain bags only like certain “food”. Yum, recyclables!

Yum!
Yum! Only PMD: Plastic bottles, metal packaging and drink-cartons.
Apparently recycling glass was always accepted (as printed on the regulation blue bags), but they've now decided that all glass recycling should be handled by glass bubbles («bulle à verre»), which are giant glass collection points that supposedly look like bubbles. In the city centre, these “bubbles” have become harder to find, and I'm sure my nearest one is at least an hour's walk from here. Not particularly convenient.

Bleu sac PMCSo, what's the story with glass recycling? I've bought some brand-new blue bags yesterday to see what the story is from the bag's perspective. According to the bag, it's preferred that I use a “bubble” but glass it still accepted! Yum!

Bugger them, glass is going to be fed to my blue bags — that's what it says to do. What do you think?


Categories Rambling, Belgium

Comments

  1. Empty any final contents into white sack, wash glass and remove label, put the glass in the blue bag, remember to place the lid in the white sack, and the label in the yellow one! Great timewaster for a rainy Sunday afternoon!

  2. Fuck that. My time is worth money, and there's no fucking way I'm emptying and washing and then disposing of contents/wrapper seperately. Aside from the chronic waste of water, (there's more than one way to be green) if I just dump the LOT in a bottle bank, there's no way it can be traced back to me. Simon, how would you rather spend the hour... emptying, washing, sorting and filing, only to feed the 3 color bin bags you have? Or take a nice leisurely walk to the nearest bottle bank, and dump the whole lot inside? Let's see them try to recycle jam jars which are still covered in jam...

  3. (Author)

    For me, the procedure is simply this (and I don't think I'm changing it): * Identify what it is: Jars, bottles, cans, cartons and milk bottles all go in the blue bag, paper and cardboard goes in the yellow bag and everything else in the white bag. * Anything that's a bottle or jar can be "cleaned" well enough by filling it with a little bit of water, closing the lid, and shaking the crap out of it. If it can't be cleaned that way, then it wasn't finished, and I wouldn't be throwing it out (I make sure I use everything I can, mostly to avoid a smelly bin, but also because I hate wasted food). Labels stay on. Lids are normally metal or plastic (recyclable) too, so they stay as well. * Envelopes with the stupid little plastic windows keep their stupid little plastic windows intact. * Padded bags I get DVDs delivered in are easy enough: You put your hand in, pull the bubble-wrap out, and it's separated well enough. * Batteries wind up in the BEBAT box at the supermarket, but I so rarely use batteries that aren't rechargeable these days. I'm perhaps very lazy, but I've also visited a recycling plant in the past. Everything in the blue bag will be washed by a machine, so the same principle as a dish-washer applies: no chunks of food, but residual stuff is OK. Labels will get removed in this process. It's then sorted by a machine which essentially blows the cans and plastic bits one way while glass (being too heavy) goes in another direction. Cans are then separated by magnets. Labels from bottles and cans are too contaminated with ink and glue to yield anything worth recycling that it's better off biodegrading anyway. Everything in the yellow bag is pulped and filtered very carefully to separate usable paper fibres from dead fibres and contaminants in many bizarre processes involving screening, spinning, floating, etc. If they didn't, I guess we'd have to clean the ink off the paper before putting it in the bin too! Recycling like this doesn't take long at all, and it's become second nature for me now anyway.

  4. You guys should watch a documentary called 'Waste Equals Food', basically the concept is, that all waste should either be food for nature or technology. Thus you don't actually have any waste at ALL ! I want to live in a waste = food city ! Current recycling is 'downcycling' eg product that is made is of 'lesser' quality. Waste = food is true recycling ( product of equal quality ) or 'upcycling' ( a more refined product ). If you prefer the book: get Cradle to Cradle.

Commenting has expired for this article.