Life in Belgium: Garbage

You wouldn't think garbage would warrant it's own post, would you?  In my orientation class at the American Women's Club, it was a topic for an entire hour.


So you have 4 different garbage bags.  Green for garden stuff, yellow for paper/cardboard, blue for plastic and cans, and white for everything else.  Much more recycling then we've done before, for sure.

White, yellow, and blue are picked up on Tuesday; white again on Friday, and green on Sunday.

Seems easy enough. 

Our garbage has been DENIED twice now.

The first time our trash was rejected it was because of the blue bag.  I've been told the blue bag has caused quite a few people quite a few problems.  One lady is rumored to have an entire garage full of rejected blue bags.  The blue bag has nice pictures on it to tell you what you can put inside it.  Plastic bottles, cartons (like chicken stock would come in), aluminum cans, and glass.  So we loaded her up with all of the above.    And Tuesday morning, our first week here, it was left behind with a huge red stop sign sticker and a warning about the glass.  APPARENTLY, we should have known that a few years ago, I guess post production of large quantities of the blue bags with the helpful pictures, they decided that they would no longer pick up glass in those bags.  There are bins spread out throughout the city where you can take those.  Well, duh.  What were we thinking! 

The second time our trash was left behind is still open to interpretation.  I have watched pick-up now a couple of times.  There is a guy that runs ahead and SOMETIMES pulls the bags out of cans and places them closer to the road.  Sometimes he leaves them in the cans.  That particular morning, I ran the trash out at like 7:10am (with my wet hair in a towel and barefoot), put the can out near the street, and saw that the runner had already passed our house (and for the record, he saw me too!).  But the truck was still making it's way down our street.  So I thought we were good.  It drove right on by our trash.  It could be that we put our trash out too late.  There are strict rules about when you can put your trash out.  You can be fined.  I think you can't put it out any earlier then 6pm the night before.  And I think there is a time in the morning that it has to be out by..... which I just assumed would be the time that the truck drove by.......but maybe it's the time the runner runs by......

We no longer put our trash out at night.  Before the girls and I got here, Matt had to sweep garbage up off the street at 4am because our lovely neighborhood fox had a feast.  Also why we have our garbage in a can - many people don't!  I guess that is why they decided they would close our street for FOUR hours last Friday to clean it.

I have since also learned that there is a 22lb weight limit to the blue bags; 42lb limit on the white bags.  And some garbage men have scales and will weigh your bags.  Seriously!


Some hard core recyclers (which we are not) find that the Belgians don't recycle nearly enough.  Like I said before, this is far more recycling then we've ever done before...... but for example, you can't put your yogurt cup in the plastics bag.  It's a white bag item.  I can see how that might be confusing.  The Belgians haven't gotten into the numbered plastics game, where you know what the number on your plastic item means (that will mean something to you hard core recyclers, not so much to me - I'm cool with throwing it in the white bag).

There were lots of stories at the Women's Club about garbage rejection.  The bottom line, when in doubt, throw it in the white bag.  Just remember the weight limit..... and know that the white bags cost nearly 5 times as much as the other colored bags.


The good news is white garbage, the really stinky stuff and our yogurt cups, gets picked up twice a week.  So if we screw up on Tuesday, there is always Friday.