In my Austrian pension room in early December, I noticed signs about the country's strict waste laws. Apparently they applied equally to hotel guest, administrator and chamber maid. The sense I got from the tone of the multilingual signs was that all three can be locked up for the same one violation.
So I mastered the categories of Austrian waste -- bioabfall, restmüll, et al -- sorting and packaging everything in my pension room like a true anal retentive chef.
Not long after returning to Tallinn, I found that Estonia has also adopted laws that allow me to apply the same skills.
While it's no doubt high time, there's been some talk in the press of how the transition has been too sudden and whether people were really ready to go overnight to European-style recycling.
Especially as there is a subspecies of people in Tallinn who could help with the sorting. They're called prükkar. Though undoubtedly a bottle-scarred breed, they're not really bums -- they don't lie in doorways or shoot heroin or the other really nasty stuff. They are these grey people who move around in the early morning light collecting bottles and other waste. And the thing is, they're really efficient. I can only liken them to urban macrophages or human vacuum cleaners for inorganic waste.
OK, maybe everyone's been there at some time or other. Everyone's been a prükkar. But still...
When my wife was in Barcelona, leaving me with the domestic duties, the garbage piled up for a couple days, unsorted. I had it positioned near the door in three bags. Then I had the three bags positioned outside the door (which in our case leads directly to the street), ready to be taken into the courtyard. For whatever reason, there they stayed, overnight. When I finally got around to it, in the morning the bags were gone. Not gone, as in ripped apart by raccoons or something with garbage strewn everywhere, but gone without a trace. Only a bag of ashes from the firegrate was left. The prükkars had opened it and retied it.
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5 comments:
New word for me - prükkar.
During 1995-1998 my wife and I lived intermittently in Lasnamäe and had occasion to observe what I now know to be prükkarid plying their trade at the dumpsters around our building. These folk too were remarkably neat, always replacing in the dumpster what they didn't take away.
Once, at dinner with friends, I happened to refer to the son of a friend back in Canada as being engaged in the mining industry as a geologist - geoloog. This drew a round of laughter and it was explained to me that geoloog in Estonian also had the connotation of 'dumpster-diver.' Sadly, they did not not provide me with the correct term prÜkkar.
Plse tell me if that sardonic slang applicaiton of geoloog is still au courant?
It is, says my wife, though I was unfamiliar with it.
It's a lot nicer than prükkar. I'm just so used to the latter.
One of my candidates in OCS with the high activity or perhaps a high metabolism or both could not apparently get enough food at breakfast, lunch and dinner even though the Army certainly provided good meals in more than ample quantity. He was caught numerous times at the mess hall dumpster, but he never made a mess. My first experience with a geoloog. A new word for me also for a dumpster diver.
Of course I have a fairly lengthy period of diving dumpsters for exculpatory material that the government threw out their back door. I wonder if the office cleaning people also wondered what happened to the bags at the back door that disappeared as did you about your bags. Or were they relieved that it was that much less to carry to the dumpster. When accosted by the police, they essentially gave me a diving permit as long as I didn't create a mess. Once another geoloog opened the dumpster door I was diving, but quickly relinquished his claim when I growled at him. That period of dumpster diving led to quite a few anecdotes.
And perhaps diving is hereditary. Another member of our family has been known to do some dumpster diving in Colorado as well as in Texas.
Dumpster diving can be surprisingly clean and sometimes honourable.
I would have nothing against eating unpeeled unspoiled produce. Working for the CHinese restaurant years ago kind of sensitized me to the waste that goes on.
I took part in amateur geology with the member of our family in Boulder, where a bread factory threw away many packaged loaves of bread every Thursday night. It was a light industrial street on the outskirts and there was no other waste in the dumpster except packaging.
The original plan was to distibute it to people downtown for free. Later there was a rumour or a fear that these were from batches where a bread machine blade had broken off. More likely the loaves were just slightly blemished.
The idea was scrapped, but the same bread kept me supplied for quite a few hiking trips.
Growing up during WW2 and in DP camps in post-war Germany, my horror of wasting food has remained with me into old age, and often compels me to retrieve 'puffickly good' fruit or baked items with nary a blemish which SWMBO ('She Who Must Be Obeyed'= Rumpole's sobriquet for his wife) has discarded into the kitchen waste. She makes a face, but tolerates it as an incurable aberration.
But on a global scale, the waste and resultant overflow of our landfill sites horrifies me too. I am told that many restaurant chains, esp. the fast-food outlets, have a policy of chucking out various items after they've sat under the heat lamps for a specified number of minutes. I haven't verified this, but I've heard it from youngsters working for these chains. Yet if one of the youngsters were to consume said items, it's a firing offense.
Some headway has been made in some municipalities across North America to channel slightly wilted produce from supermarkets, day-old bread from bakeries, etc., to NGOs helping the poor, and sometimes to homeless shelters. But I gather that only a tiny fraction of quite edible and 'safe' food is thus recycled.
Toomas' reference to government waste prompts me to confess that while employed by the Canadian Pubic Service [sic - :) ], I too witnessed instances of massive waste, chucking-out of all manner of stuff both edible and indedible: instances too numerous to catalogue here.
Perhaps the outstanding episode, of which I heard (and read) at second hand took place in the nation's capital, in an alleyway behind a DND building (Dept. of National Defence). In the course of a general upgrade of computer systems, massive amounts of hardware (CPUs, monitors, peripherals the lot) along with boxes upon boxes of Microshaft OS's and software (most still in shrink-wrap) had been set out with the trash. None of it really obsolete, btw, or even obsolescent.
A reporter was drawn to the site after some local rubbies started toting mint-condition CPUs and monitors into area pawn-shops.
This episode was quickly hushed up and expunged from the pages of newspapers.
In theory, all such superannuated materiel is supposed to be disposed of by the Ministry of Supply, Services and Public Works (or some such mouthful) via public auctions, and no doubt even in part is, but somehow I have the lingering suspicion that the cumbersome and top-heavy bureaucracy carrying out this disposal might operate with a net deficit...
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