I’ve probably mentioned it before but we have 4 trash cans which are used on a regular basis here: Blue for paper, Black for regular household trash, Green for garden cuttings and Brown for biotrash. In addition, we also have special yellow plastic sacks for the disposal of packaging and plastic items. Quite a bit to keep up with but at least I feel like I’m doing something for the environment through all this.

From the time we bought the house in August 2006, we have had no service for our biotrash can. We weren’t really sure why but regardless of what was in the can, they would drive right by it on trash day.

Since I was unsure of my German skills at time (and bounce back and forth on my capabilities still), I asked Stefan to take care of it. Unfortunately that turned into a more complicated task than anticipated. He wanted to go into the local courthouse to take care of it in person….but they’re only open a few hours a week. We knew there would be a couple of days he’d take off and hoped to get it done then. Then when all those opportunities passed, we figured when he was on gardening leave for three months we’d take care of it. Again, it didn’t happen because we would either forget about it on the days it was open or we were too busy doing other stuff for the renovation of the guest house.

Eventually I took matters into my own hands and just called them. Stefan has so much going on with other things, I figured I could at least get the ball rolling in case we needed to complete a form or something else. My phone conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi. I’ve got a biotrash can here but whenever I put it on the street for collection, they just pass it by.

The trash official: That can’t be. Every trash can is collected each time.

Me: Ok, well we put our can out several times over the past year and they’ve never picked it up.

So she asks for our address and then explains that we don’t have a chip in our trashcan and they can’t pick it up because they wouldn’t know who to bill. Ah ha! The previous owner kept everything that would have gone into the bio trash and used it in his compost. We’d actually love to do something like that ourselves but still haven’t finished our compost bin…and there are always some things that you just don’t want to throw in there. Plus we don’t have a chipper so all the vines and things like that would take forever to decompose.

Naturally my next question to the official was, “How can I get the chip??” It was actually a rather simple process: I put the trash can out on a specific day and they drove around and chipped it. I was a bit concerned that I wouldn’t know whether they’d been by or not but they left a little bright orange sticker on the can. Otherwise I couldn’t see the chip at all and was still a bit concerned that we might still be stuck with this yucky trash.

BUT yesterday morning the moment of truth came. I put the biotrash can out on Tuesday night and when the collection truck drove around in the morning I watched him pull up to our can, drive out the little arm to scoop up our can, lift it up and actually dump the trash in his truck. Talk about exciting! I know, I know…it’s the little things in life that really get to me. 😉 But after more than a year of not being able to use the thing, it really is a relief to finally have them picking up this trash. Hopefully I’ll use it less and less in the future….but things like chicken bones are always really important to have a place for. Flushing them down the toilet just isn’t an option, and neither is putting them in my compost pile!