Pissed Off Planet's Guide to Western Europe: Germany. Entry 2: Umweltschutz

December 11: Funky pinks and oranges of nature's chemical technicolor coat, hovering over the Ikea monolith in the distance, just outside Erfurt. I do love modern life, wind turbines, butterfly interchanges, chemical sunsets. Germany has all that in spades.

Later that day.

Had a typical day at work, except for the fact that I haven't been able to blog in the mornings for a couple of days now. But I have so many things to write about, I just keeping making notes in the cell phone and emailing them to myself for later cut-and-pasting. Piecemeal blog. 

Since I'd been such a busy little office bee in the hive of Academia, I decided to treat myself to another trip to another One Euro store, like the One Dollar stores that have popped up like measles all over the States, a reflection of how little people get paid, one because it is sometimes the only place they can afford to go, two because the cheapness of the product has to do with reduced wages and cheap production that snuffs the economic life from a person. But I am now in the phase of collecting official Stuff, things like baskets to hold my toiletries in the bathroom, tea-light holders, picture frames, citrus zesters, and since buying such a wide variety of things at the same time will bankrupt me, I go to what used to be called a Tante Emma Laden (No relation to Osama Bin Laden). You need something to fill the house that Jack built. I bought a breathtaking amount of plastic storage containers, the kind of Stuff you don't feel bad about buying because it weighs so little, even though it's worse in so many ways. And I finally got around to picking out a couple of discreet rubbish bins for sorting my trash. But sorting trash here is complicated, so you should probably read the entry in the field guide:

The Pissed off Planet's Guide to Western Europe: Germany

Entry 2: Umweltschutz

Germans, despite their penchant for personal specialization, also have a talent for multitasking, because, naturally, it is a hallmark of efficiency, which is a part of Northern European DNA. Actually, it takes up the majority of the double helix.

One of the most impressive and distinctive manifestations of this talent focuses on turning dreary chores that are a requisite part of community living into national pastimes in order to encourage natives' continued participation in the social contract, such as sweeping doorways and staring at passers-by without hiding the fact, trying to buy a car, and Unweltschutz, which roughly means, "protecting the environment by playing the game of Hide-and-Seek."

The Germans, at least their government, have been committed to protecting the environment for decades, for highly practical reasons. A bad environment is not efficient. It does not allow for the highest rate of productivity at the lowest cost per capita while still ensuring that most people get almost 4 weeks of vacation a year and have enough money to eat lots of pork. Thus, the environment must not only be protected, but also improved.

Because Germans understand the term "improved" as "so complicated that it overloads the human critical faculty," protecting the environment occupies 86.3% of people's time.  The other 13.7% is divided among visiting tax advisers, making Termine and scheduling their funerals (See future field guide entry: Beerdigung). This serves as a great distraction from things like the weather, the resultant pasty skin tone, and the 45% in taxes they pay on their income.

Children learn about Umweltschutz, which primarily centers on recycling, at a very young age. They are issued their first toy garbage bin at the age of one, and then told that the world will end in horrible, horrible ways that spiral down into inefficiency if they don't do their part. The subsequent guilt and anxiety leads people to screaming "no nuclear power plants!," even when it's no longer fashionable, and beginning the odyssey that is recycling.

One notices when buying garbage cans in Germany that the most preferable form is a large, rectangular bin with multiple dividers in a neutral tone that stands somewhere obsequiously in the background, doing it's best to fade into the walls.  "Don't mind me, but if you have some garbage you'd like to separate, I'll be more than happy to do that for you. I am specifically trained for that. I have a piece of paper to confirm it, too." Sometimes people opt for smaller bins so they can hide them neatly under the kitchen sink. But then you reduce the amount of garbage you can separate and later place on display to show your recycling street cred.

The Germans have decided upon what they consider the most efficient recycling system that simultaneously kills vital brain cells needed for questioning arbitrary bureaucracy and nurtures the German need for absolute order in a world where that is simply impossible, which then generates something to complain about, which supports another national pastime: complaining. This will also be a future field guide entry.

Germans have devised ingenious methods to not only promote recycling, but also turn it into a variety of amusing activities that promote community-building.  One of the most renowned methods is the Pfand, the deposit one pays on plastic and glass bottles. The majority of bottles in Germany can be recycled, so to encourage people to do this, they charge anywhere between an extra 15 to 25 cents for each recyclable bottle. They will give you the money when you have passed all the empty bottles through a mysterious machine that inspects the bar code, tells you that your bottle can not be accepted, then takes the bottle eventually after you are on the verge of crying, and then issues a small receipt that you use to buy more bottles that will send you back to the machine. One can observe lines of Germans impatiently waiting for their turn at the machine. And since this is such a laborious process that involves lugging bottles to a foreign location in order to try to recoup your losses, people go rarely, which means they bring copious amounts of bottles when they do finally go. This slows down the process and forces Germans to wait longer, which means they can spend more time in line ignoring each other, or complaining about the fact that the way people ignore each other has changed for the worse over time.

Once the typical German has finished redeeming his bottles for more bottles, he goes home and begins the other entertaining task of separating  glass, paper, cardboard, compost, plastic and other Verpackung, "packaging materials." Glass that can not be recycled must be dropped off at a large collection container approximately 20 miles away from your house, which ensures a nice walk through the refreshing -25 degree weather in winter. If one is lucky, one does not have to separate the bottles into clear, green and brown glass, but that is usually a privilege reserved for the dead, so one must separate at the container as well. If the German has an extra arm or two or a friend, he can also take his paper and cardboard with him to the area, where another container eagerly awaits his processed wood pulp. This paper will later return to community life as toilet paper so rough that it makes you question whether God is actually a benevolent entity.

After ridding himself of glass and paper, the German really gets to enjoy himself in the process of attempting to figure out which remaining garbage goes into which receptacle.  Obviously, all food items (as long as they are not greasy or made of food) go into compost, as well as plant materials and small children who did not properly play with their toy garbage cans. Once the German has been driven to kicking puppies out of sheer frustration, he moves on to the most ingenious part of the system, Restmüll, "remaining garbage," and the Gelber Sack, the "yellow sack."

The Gelber Sack is a wonder of German efficiency, a large, transparent yellow sack made from, you guessed it, recycled material. It is designed to hold Leichtverpackungsmüll, "light packaging." Since this includes an expansive list of items, almost everything can go into the Gelber Sack, except packaging made of glass and paper, newspapers, Restmüll, which has yet to be properly defined, "Audio and video cassettes, CDs, buckets, watering cans, plastic bowls, laundry baskets, wading pools, sheet protectors, children's toys, curing sheets, cooking utensils" and old people. You may fill as many Gelbe Säcke as you wish, if you can figure out where to obtain them. In some areas, the German can buy his Gelber Sack from a normal store with only a brief encounter with a Kollege. In other areas, where they really encourage people meeting each other and wasting hours of precious time, you must go directly to the waste management company and ask for them, upon which the Kollege will check the computer according to the address you give them, scan it suspiciously, and then say, "All right, you can have four sacks. But this will have to last you until 2014." You can also try obtaining them online from the agency, but you will have drowned in your sorted piles by the time the sacks arrive.

Because the Gelber Sack is a mystical object of unlimited wonder, many Germans and especially non-natives spend a great deal of their lives figuring out what exactly goes into the sack. Multiple websites are devoted to answering this question, and since the rules vary from area to area, one can spend up to 10 hours looking for the right list, which then gives the German something to complain about later.

One must not forget to properly rinse plastic containers that contained food, such as yogurt cups, non-recyclable bottles, meat trays, and One Euro plastic bins that break after three uses. Fortunately, the energy saved by making unholy toilet paper compensates for the water wasted in the washing process.

Once the German has finished making multiple phone calls and crawling the internet for guidance, he may throw everything imaginable into the Gelber Sack and then put it on display on the required day of offering so that everyone can see how hard he is working to protect the environment and obey the law:

The sacrifices are then collected by Müllmänner, "trash men," and taken to a processing temple where they are properly sorted by highly efficient machines that can complain about having to determine which piece of garbage goes into which specialized pile and make you a Belegtes Brötchen in the process. Once the final phase of sorting has been completed, at least 20% of it is thrown into an incinerator, never to be welcomed into the bosom of a machine that will turn it into a new One Euro plastic bin.

Now, the only thing left to do is throw away the compost and Restmüll into their appropriate containers, which, of course, are separate and placed in different cities. This ensures that the German gets another good walk in before the end of the day and gives him a really good excuse to go out and drink until he can no longer feel his face.

As Germans have become less and less amused by the Gelber Sack, it will eventually be supplanted by something more efficient and confusing, so that technology and the recycling spirit keep pace with the demands and desires of someone other than the Germans. And once again the country will have struck a balance between entertainment and social responsibility, much in the same way it has created even more frustrating ways to connect with a human customer service representative on the customer service hotlines that are rarely open..

And our time is up.