The Recycling Dump

My job was to take all the crap WiseMan cleaned out of the shed to the dump. I decided that Today Was The Day.

It had, of course, rained last night, sogging up the carpets and filling the rusty cans with water. Should have done this last week. Anyway, I got gloves on and chucked it all in the back of the station wagon. This is one reason to have a station wagon - to transport the stuff you buy and then the garbage back out.

I drove down to the local recycling dump. They have a container for everything and you are expected to be a good Swede and do your sorting. Electrical cables here, other electric junk there, broken gardening implements in this container (there were so many of them, and I contributed a broken shovel). Then there were the generics: metal, paper, plastic, burnable, non-recyclable, and virke. The latter turns out to be lumber and construction materials.

I did my best, but as I was returning from the metal container I found the lady in charge fishing my wooden + cloth chair out of "burnable" and putting it into "virke". She also picked out my wine bag-in-a-box from "burnable" and put it in "paper". But I was lazy, the bag was still in the box. I fully expected to get a dressing down from her.

I asked her about the oil and gasoline plastic containers. Oil containers are burnable, gasoline are treated like butter tubs - plastic. Whatever.

While I was there there was another women tossing trash - she had construction worker clothes on (screaming yellow or orange with a gazillion pockets). As she pulled away I saw the name of her company on the side of her truck: Byggamie. What a play on words! Bygg is Swedish for "construction", gamie is from the Greek for "marriage". Sounds like a couple in the construction business that have a very memorable name for their company. I smiled, and she smiled back. And I realized, we were more women then men (two Türkish guys with a truck) at the dump at that moment!