In the US, we get garbage emptied weekly. I’d like to think our family is pretty good with minimizing garbage. We recycle our cans, milk gallons, plastic bags and we have a compost (and depending on the week gets a lot or a little deposit). Thomas even had composting worms to eat some leftover food to produce great soil but that’s another story. Even with that, I’d say we generate about … 140-200 liters or 3-4 kitchen bags (13 gallons) a week. Remember we have one big diaper producing toddler.

Here, you pay by the bag. You purchase the bags (there are different sizes) and put your garbage in them. The more garbage you produce, the more expensive it is for you. In the bigger villages, the truck comes to get your garbage. Since Valeina is small, we have a bin at the entrance where every resident has a key to deposit their trash. Selling points for some commercials focus on how small the product becomes so as to reduce trash. Laundry detergent comes in plastic bags. Milk comes in boxed cartoons, thinner than the milk cartons we have in the US.

We’ve been here over 3 weeks and have only thrown away 1 bag (35 liters) and the 2nd one is almost full. The Swiss are great with composting, reusing and recycling everything! The diapers are much thinner than in the US. We get baseball sizes here while we get cantaloup sizes over in the US. Same absorption but less bulkier. Less cardboard boxes as containers ie for diapers, cereal boxes. We are definitely more aware of what we buy, how it’s packaged and how it’s going into the trash as well as what needs to be composted, reused, or recycled.

This is a backpack to compare with the garbage bag. The trash bag is bigger but not by much. Most of it contains diapers and milk cartons.