Waste not, think not

This story is actually comparatively old, but work isn’t especially enticing at the moment. So …

Nearly two years ago, “wiser” heads in Zagreb were searching for some way to get the city’s residents to recycle more. Although Zagreb uses all the standard bins (household, organic, paper, and plastic waste), its Zagrebians don’t. Or at least not in any sort of differentiated manner. Whatever needs to be thrown away tends to land into / onto the first handy receptacle, be it a bin, a bush, or a boulevard. The picture at the right is not staged and can really only be described as “precycling”. (And, yes, that is indeed the organic-waste bin right next door.)

The solution?

ZG Vrećice or new plastic bags for household waste that, from then on, represented the only way in which such waste would be collected. Apparently, the logic was that because Zagrebians would be reluctant to shell out the additional, new user fee of 0.26 EUR per bag (on top of the “mandatory minimum public service” fees (or garbage tax) that every homeowner has to pay every month anyway), they would be more careful to reduce what went into them and thereby would start sorting their waste properly.

(And people are indeed inherently and endlessly creative when it comes to saving money sometimes. At least in Not-Bielefeld, the city had to start rationing the number of yellow (plastic) recycling bags per household because people would use the otherwise free bags for their normal, household waste. Ever hear the old adage about how you can never make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious? Same idea …)

But, work with me for a second here …

All told, this means that the city’s solution to get Zagrebians to recycle more (although most plastics currently cannot be recycled anyway) is to buy, at a premium price (0.26 EUR for a 10-L bag?!), new, purpose-designed plastic bags that although they themselves are recyclable (but with no indication whether or not they are made from recycled plastic) are treated like the normal household waste they contain to be either burned or end up in the dump? Talk about leading by disaster …

And, on top of that, if saving the environment wasn’t incentive enough to sign on to the new system (which it never was before), there were the inevitable fines for not using it to help your motivation along. Or for other people to help themselves to your bins to avoid using the new system. Yes, the new system also meant that Zagrebians were now responsible for the contents of their garbage bins and could get fined for anything neispravno (= nicht ordnungsgemäß = not in accordance with the rules and regulations) in the bin, even if it came from some unknown, third party. And, Zagreb’s garbagemen (sorry, household-waste collection engineers) were indeed initially tasked with not just collecting the garbage but also ensuring that its presentation was indeed ispravno and reporting any violations.

The end result was either that a few people started locking up their bins (as in locking the bins themselves, not just locking them away) but that many more simply abandoned them altogether to instead throw their ZG Vrećice onto the sidewalk to wait it out until the next weekly collection day. Now, considering that it can easily top 35 ºC on a summer’s day in Zagreb, most of those ZG Vrećice had learned how to walk (in an oozy sort of way) days before they were collected. At least the bins confined both the garbage and its stink in one place.

(Abandoning the household bins completely was, as it turns out, actually exactly what the city wanted and had decreed as part of the new system. Except that the ZG Vrećice were only be put out on collection day itself to instead learn to walk in the comfort of their own home. (Oh joy …) And, as demonstrated by the precycling example above, the new system does absolutely nothing to prevent people from putting the wrong stuff into the bins that remain. (And they do.))

And, as with many other dog owners, this all made the collection of their poop (the dogs’, not their owners’) even more work than usual. Blue poop bags are uncommon, especially in the convenient ZG Vrećice standard of 10 L. And, if I’m conscientious enough to pick up my dog’s poop in the first place, then I’m unlikely to throw it neispravno into someone else’s bin for them to be fined for. (Maybe.) Finally, because buying individual ZG Vrećice to use as single-use poop bags is clearly out of the question, it means literally lugging the shit around for even longer than normal until a public garbage can appears like an oasis on the horizon.

Fortunately, however, the enthusiasm for the new system (if there was any in the first place) died down quickly, probably because the enthusiasm for issuing the fines died down even more quickly. Like garbagemen the world over, their counterparts in Zagreb have a shitty enough job as it is, even more so when you consider that they tend to work during the night, and they probably tossed the idea of sorting through the bins (with their bare hands!) to issue possible fines into the nearest ZG Vrećice.

And so, nearly two years on, it all turns out to be another example of classic admin: instituting a “great” new idea (and even more great new laws and paperwork to go along with it) to quickly return to a system pretty much exactly like it was before.