Whatsit Wednesday: Environment station

It sounds strange in English. In the Netherlands, city neighborhoods all have their own “environment station” or street. It is called a “Milieu perron” and consists of several containers which are partially underground and partially above ground. These containers are for various sorts of trash: glass, paper, plastic-metal-drink containers, and even diapers. Every week or two a truck comes, lifts the containers out of their hole in ground, and empties them, taking their respective trash to the trash collection and sorting area in the city. 

Everyone here is used to separating their trash. In the house one already considers what kind of trash it is. Food scraps are put into a green container which is also placed on the street to be picked up regularly. Paper is usually collected in some sort of cardboard box and then either taken to the environment station or placed o the street to be picked up once a month. Even batteries and electronics can be collected at the local supermarket in special boxes. 

In Maastricht all the rest of the trash (which is called “restafval”) was put in a red and white plastic trash sack and put out on the street to be collected twice a month. You could not put your sack out until after 5pm before the day of collection. Ion 2025 the city of Maastricht is changing their rules. Suddenly, the environment station will look quite different. If it will encourage people to continue separating trash or not is a big question. 

The environment station will still have the containers, but now most of them will be for “rest”, the stuff people used to put in the red-white sacks (which they had to buy). The containers for glass and paper will remain, as will the container for diapers. But the containers for PMD (plastic-metal-drink) will be turned into containers for “rest”. And people will need to use a special card to dump their trash here. It will be weighed or measured in some way. 

In the meantime, the PMD will still need to be sorted, but this will happen in the house. All of the PMD will now go into a plastic sack (which is free at the time) and placed on the street to be collected twice a month. For some people this change simply means exchanging sacks and carrying heavier sacks to the environment station. But for older people, this may mean that they have difficulties getting their trash out. 

Some of the reasons for these changes has been that the environment stations recently (in 2024) were getting more and more messy. People would simply drop their trash sacks at the station, not separating anything. Trash was left blowing about in the wind - not placed in the containers. Officials hope that this will now stop. I will be interested to see how many sacks are now simply dumped at the environment station (because people do not want to have it weighed or do not have the money for it). 

In a small country full of people like the Netherlands, taking care of trash and the shared spaces has always been a challenge. This has become part of the national identity. It will interesting to see how this evolves in the coming year.