My folks housing cooperative have a long standing internal battle against people in the cooperative not taking responsability for the recycling routines. In short, many choose to throw more or less everything in the room reserved for bulky trash (such as furniture), resulting in high costs for the cooperative when trash workers sort out the refrigerators and bottles from the couches and bags of old clothes.
This unruly behaviour has now come to an end. The board of the cooperative have put in place a harsh and virtually impenetrable line of defense: The Bulky Trash Watchman. Before this new regime, everyone had their own keys to the room, and could sneek down with their illegal trash at 4am in the morning without being noticed. No more. Now there’s one key, possessed by a man dubbed the Bulky Trash Watchman of the block.
Instead of being a 24-hour room, the bulky trash room os now open Sundays 7pm-8pm. The Watchman stands, with a grim look upon his face, inside the room and carefully eyes your bulky trash before nodding and directing you to place it next to whatever is in there already. The eagle eyes of the Watchman sees all attempts of cheating, and will happily share the regulations on what stuff goes in the room, and where one should recycle trash deemed unworthy.
Needless to say, the costs for recycling for the housing cooperative have dropped dramatically in a very short space of time. Good proof that regulation and big brother might need to step in when we oh-so-earthfriendly citizens talk the talk, but fail to walk the walk.
Tags: Sweden, Trash legislation
everydaytrash 
Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 11:28 am |
[…] In Sweden, reports the Everyday Trash blog, one housing co-op decided to crack down on residents flouting recycling laws, moving to a scheduled large item drop off times monitored by the grim-faced “Bulky Trash Watchman.” […]