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Just got a complaint from building management saying “one of the residents complained that you weren’t separating trash properly”!
Even though now we are instructing guests to separate, and NOT allowing guests to dispose of trash in the building trash room by themselves. I guess some busybody opened one of the ‘combustible’ trash bags and found a plastic bottle or a metal can… and some sort of sign that it came from our unit!
According to that diagram, if the different types of garbage are picked up at different times, and assuming four weeks in a month, you are taking out various types of garbage 14 times a month!
Unless you have nothing but anal engineers staying at your place. good luck getting your guests to follow that way too-technical of a guide. So there is a ‘Trash Police’ after all? I be darn.
I feel your pain, though it is only three categories in my ciry, because we get fined if there are mistakes. We have compost, recycling, and trash, and I have a laminated guide next to the three containers in my rental. However, I always have to resort it when guests leave. Some try, which I appreciate, but many guests just throw everything in the trash.
Hahaha. That is so apropos. Just had some German quests, the guy wanted to know all about the solar power and wind generator combination, send me a million articles on the subject afterwards.
Wow. Just wow. On the one hand I understand that in a city the size of Tokyo, they may have to do things like that to deal with all the trash generated. On the other hand, I commend you for having the courage to host in the first place. If we had to deal with trash rules that onerous, I’d have known going in that I’d be sorting guest trash after every check out. There is no way my guests would bother to deal with it, and even the ones that tried would get it wrong.
If you can believe it, I live in a town where recycling is a choice rather than a requirement, and the rules for doing so are straightforward and easy. Still, 95% of my guests toss all their returnable bottles and cans in the trash. I dig them out.
I just love it: I’d love to send this diagram to the Kardashian family who gives the teens (not mine:)) all over the world the example to use disposable cups//bowls/+all the possible take away stuff…
All of our guests have asked how to recycle!
And the Germans have always been ahead of us all on recycling: that shouldn’t be a mockery. I remember in the 90’s in France - @Barthelemy when all the wine bottles etc. went to the same place. I stayed in a French family and believe me, the number of bottles wasn’t little.
It really wasn’t mockery. Every body knows that Germans tend to be very eco-conscious and very organised and indeed I can’t picture the average French (or Italian for instance) guest following such detailed waste-sorting rules.
As for wine bottles in France, recycling of glass bottles has been a standard practice for… a long time as I was born in the 1980s and have always seen collection points for glass bottles. Now for sure, there are eco-unconscious families who don’t sort their waste
My German guests are the only ones who have asked for a chart of recyclables so that they could sort properly. Everyone else just ignores our recycling bin, so I sort after they leave. Well, except for the bathroom trash. I will let a toothpaste box go by so as not to touch dirty tissues.
We have three trash cans outside - one for household trash, one for recycling (bottles and so forth) and one for yard waste. This is fully explained in the house manual. I leave plenty of trash bags in the rental so that guests can separate the trash if they wish. Not one guest EVER has asked about recycling!
We are pretty good about rubbish sorting in Australia, but it does remind me of a sign I once saw in a bus in Venezuela. “Please don’t leave your rubbish on the floor of the bus. Throw it out the window!”
Today’s guests were not German or Austrian. They were three older Americans, late 50’s or early 60’s, here for a medical procedure. This meant that they basically spent their time in the room recovering. [I knew this in advance.] And when they left this morning, imagine my shock when I went to start cleaning and their recyclables were totally sorted properly! Yea for older, frugal Yankees! No fuss. No questions. Just sort the stuff. I checked. They also used the A/C at 74º, not 66º like the young turks. Not my kind of people in general, but I feel more fondly now.