Germany's Recycling Derangement Syndrome and the Wackos' "Wertstoffhof"

Before I even finished this article, I learned about another German idiocy: lawn mowers with a seat now have to be insured like other utility vehicles. Subsequently to media reports on that bureaucratic absurdity, it was clarified that this applies only to lawn mowers that reach speeds of at least 6 kilometers per hour (that's less than 4 mph). But now let's talk about the Recycling Derangement Syndrome, which could be cured by a combination of human and artificial intelligence, both of which kinds are hard to come by in that country's government.

The two formal dictatorships that existed on German soil in the 20th century were able to count on the active support of low-IQ helpers who relished in their authority over different aspects of the everyday lives of the system's victims. Now they have an informal dictatorship in place from which I have fortunately escaped . Insanities are forced on the general public by the political zeitgeist, which most of the media religiously adheres to and into which the educational system indoctrinates children.

The term "Wertstoffhof" (which literally translates as "valuable resources center") could have been coined by either one of those extremist and totalitarian systems. Now that I have left that moronic country for good, I know for sure that I will never visit one again, at least not in Germany. I inevitably had to so--a lot in fact--as I was disposing of a lot of things ahead of my emigration. So I'd just like to explain what the Wertstoffhof tells us all about Germany's broken political system as well as the sky-high levels of tolerance of their citizenry for stupidities and hassle.

Let's start with how it should work, and how it can work. I now live in the Principality of Monaco, and waste disposal is simple: there's only one type of garbage can, plus there are only two types of collection containers that I have to use to faciliate recycling: there are yellow ones for all household waste that consists of plastic and/or paper, and green ones for glass bottles. I'm pretty sure they use advanced computer-controlled systems to sort all of that material properly. Obviously, plastic is processed differently from paper, even if both go into the same container.

On the other side of the border, in the French village of Cap d'Ail, it's almost as straightforward. They have three recycling containers (plastic, paper, glass).

Now, here's what I had to go through in Germany--and what others are still forced to endure:

• I had four types of garbage bins in front of the house. One for anorganic garbage, one for organic garbage, one for paper, and one for "Wertstoffe" ("valuable resources").
• To dispose of glass bottles (which I rarely had to), I had to put them into separate containers for brown glass, white glass, and green glass. Let's look at it this way: that's as many containers just for glass bottles as my neighbors in Cap d'Ail have for the entirety of their recycling needs, and even that is one more container than I need to know and use here in Monaco.
• What about everything else? I had to walk or drive to a Wertstoffhof. In my area there were different ones, with different times of service. The closest one was open every Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday from 2:00 to 6:30 PM; on Wednesday additionally from 10:00 AM to noon, and on Saturday from 8:00 to 2:00 PM. If I drove a little further, some other Wertstoffhof in the area would be open at different--and similarly hard to remember--times.
• Even that would have been OK--and not worth an article like this--if it had simply meant that I could take my recyclable trash there, dump it (maybe into a couple of different types of containers), and go. But no. In order to show what ideological people there call Haltung (i.e., to stand on hypermoral high ground), average and reasonable people have to suffer.
• You find a multiplicity of containers at a Wertstoffhof. One for old wood. One for hard plastic. One for anything metallic. One for paper. And on top of all those containers, they have a hall with large plastic bags. For example, one just for compact discs. But the worst part is what you have to do with your plastic. They seriously distinguish between hard plastic (which goes into a container), styrofoam, mixed plastic--and the transparent cover you use for documents still won't go into any of those myriad containers or plastic bags, but they tell you to take it home with you and dispose of it as part of your household garbage. (The distinction between plastic used for packaging and other material is also made where I live now, but the overall system is much more straightforward and convenient.)
• It costs a lot of time. They don't even care to put up signs that would make it easy to find everything. You have to ask the (numerous) Wertstoffhof employees all the time where you find this or that. What adds insult to injury is that those people aren't all as nice as the ones who gave me an extra 10 minutes beyond regular opening hours on my last evening in Germany. Some of them are people with an IQ of 80 or lower who visibly enjoy their authority looking over the shoulders of all those innocent citizens (again, like in those totalitarian German systems) and get to correct when they put something into the wrong container or bag. With a few exceptions, they don't tend to be helpful.

The net effect is that many people are dissuaded from recycling. They just try to put as much into their household garbage cans (the anorganic ones) as possible, knowing that the collectors are unlikely to even check what's inside. So you get away with simply not recycling much.

All of that could be handled by AI-controlled machines, and we're not even talking about today's AI with generative capabilities but relatively old-fashioned AI-based image recognition. But that's too much to ask for, given they don't even have smart meters but let people fill out postcards once a year to report the values of their electricy meters .

Overregulation doesn't work. It's a waste of resources in every respect: time, money, energy, and natural resources. In the end, it also erodes support for democracy.