Hubby took today and tomorrow off so we’re taking advantage of the time to get a few things taken care of like registering ourselves at our new address and other bureaucratic things like that. We also found out that the drop off truck for dangerous chemicals was in town today so we decided to find out just how difficult that process would be. The wine cellar had many containers of old paint and other unidentified substances on shelves down there and you’re not allowed to just throw them away in the regular trash unless the paint is dried out already.
Disposal of special substances can be a real pain here so we fearing it might be an unpleasant experience. We had about 130 liters of various paints that have been used around the house. But we didn’t want to keep most of it because they used the wrong type of exterior paint on the house to begin with which doesn’t allow the walls to breathe. Plus the original color of the main house was a bit too yellow for our taste and since we don’t plan to paint the entire house yet, we’ll need to match it to the faded version which we like better anyway. We did keep the 3 buckets of dark green paint that we have although we think it’s the shade of green from the outside doors that we like the least but at least we might be able to get most of them matching finally.
You can see our pile of buckets here. The rules state that you’re only supposed to throw away 100 liter or 100 kilos. Most of the buckets aren’t full, though, so we figured they would count by the actual volume of the liquid…and worst case they’d just tell us to take it back home and come to the next disposal drop off which is in two months. There were also a few containers that weren’t the original containers so we worried that might be a problem also. Instead, we found it to be one of the most simple processes ever here.
We drove up the the truck which is a huge semi-truck that has been modified with all sort of huge drums to pour various chemicals in. They have a big scale where they weigh everything to make sure you’re not over your limit and they ask you what’s in the containers. Of course that question wasn’t always easy for us to answer since we weren’t 100% sure but we were pretty sure that for the most part it was various types of paints.
It turns out that they actually judge the volume on the size of the bucket, regardless of how much is actually inside it. But because we were basically the first people there today, he had mercy on us and took everything so we don’t have to worry with this again later. We were very surprised to say the least and extremely pleased that we now have one less thing to worry about disposing of. Now we just need to get a big trash container to get rid of the shelving down there, move out a bunch of other stuff and we can finally get started on the wine cellar…
