A Summary at Three Weeks

It's raining today, thus cancelling a planned trip to Rotterdam. In exchange I will post a few items about daily life in contemporary Netherlands.

Garbage collection is a community effort. Every street has garbage disposal bins. If the street is very long then the containers are placed at strategic intervals. Usually the bins include a regular container for waste, and at least one other for recyclables. When residents want to dispose of large items, such as old appliances or broken furniture, they place them next to the waste containers. Collection of these items occurs at no extra cost.

The disposal bins are fairly discrete. This photo of the street where we are living has two bins just behind the black car on the right.


Dutchies --- as they call themselves --- are notoriously clean. Thus the disposal area is not really an eye sore.

The cleanliness of the community may be enhanced by the fact that the garbage collectors come about three times each week.

The frequency of collection is a likely reflection of the size of the disposal bins, which are underground storage tanks. 



When a resident places a bag of garbage in the collection bin, it drops down into an underground storage container.

On collection day when the garbage truck comes around, the truck has an arm on it that hoists the storage container out of the ground before dumping the garbage in the back of the truck.

All of this takes about 15 minutes, which is probably good because on many of the small streets like this one, through traffic is blocked.