Bundling

As much as I love doing something good for the environment, I hate cardboard recycling day in Zurich. Every four weeks my husband and I play what amounts to a game of ‘Not It’ when it comes to whose turn it is to prepare the cardboard for pick up. This morning it was me.

After cutting two pieces of string and making a cross with it on the floor, I precariously piled the various cardboard pieces in my best attempt to get them into a configuration which would actually stay together with mere string. This is not easy when the pieces vary greatly in size, shape, and smushability (that’s my made-up word for the day). Toilet paper tubes are the worst.

Then, careful not to knock anything out of the pile, I stuck one knee and then the other down on top of my creation and tied up the strings. The knee method is the only way I have come up with to get the string tight enough so that the little pieces of cardboard stay wedged in. Then I stepped back and admired my work before handing it off to my husband on his way out the door. Hopefully it made it to the curb without falling apart. Behold my masterpiece:

I am convinced the Swiss must take courses in the fine art of cardboard bundling all through school, and thus have a much easier time at it than we do. Otherwise, why would these normally logical and efficient people not come up with a better way to do cardboard pick up…. Say, letting us just toss it all into a bin? Ah, the mysteries of Switzerland.