Recycling

It is often said that recycling is a way of life in Switzerland.  This is misleading.  It is more accurate to say that the Swiss have taken the now universal (and truly, age-old) practice of re-processing waste into new material, and made it Swiss. How?

First and foremost, recycling has been systematized. Second, it has been made into work.

In many cities in the world, recycling is a fortnightly process of divine judgement, separating one’s spent goods into two different containers bound respectively for the eternal damnation of the landfill (or, more vividly, the anaerobic hellfire of the gasification plant), and, in the second pile, for the meritorious reward of a second life of renewed productivity via the recycling plant.  In short, you put your stuff into a bin and leave it on the curb every other Tuesday.  Not so in Switzerland.  

Here, the recyclable is distinguished from waste, but also further subdivided into a pantheon of characters with names, to paraphrase Barthes, like Teutonic gods: Dosen, Alu, Karton . . .

Glass is lugged up the street to the large central collection bins, as are tins.  Some plastics can be returned to bins in the supermarket, though even here, plastic soft drink bottles are sorted separately from plastic milk bottles.  Paper and cardboard have to be tied – only with the approved gauge of string – into symmetrical bundles, the dimensions of which are also centrally mandated.  These are then stacked into tidy piles and collected by municipal authorities, though not on the same days.  Other plastics are returned to local recycling depots with baffling hours. 

Is this a way of life?  And if so, what kind of life is it?

Someone call an anthropologist.

Nordic Walking

Why has Nordic walking taken the hillsides of Switzerland by storm? 

Nordic walking, for the uninitiated, is a form of brisk walking assisted – or encumbered – by a pair of poles of the sort normally used for Nordic skiing.  (This is what gives Nordic walking its name, though it is worth noting the sport is comparatively less popular in sporty, easygoing Scandinavia – and the slight frown of patriotic disappointment this arouses here in Helvetica: why is it not called Alpine Walking?)

Nordic Walking of course owes some of its popularity to sheer novelty: Switzerland has long believed in the Calvinistic merit of what Barthes called “the morally uplifting walk” through the mountainside, so it took a clever entrepreneur to discover a new twist on bipedalism, which has been with us unchanged for eons. 

And yet the appeal is more firmly rooted than this.  Nordic walking succeeds through craftily grafting a few key elements of Swissness onto what is an outwardly simple activity.  Walking is made Swiss through adding high-tech paraphernalia, adding an element of complexity and a set of regulations, and most of all through simply making it more work.  (This is work, of course, in the physiological sense: Nordic walking brings a higher metabolic cost than ‘regular’ walking, though the implication of the Swiss love of productiveeconomic work is also germane.)  Being perfectionists, the Swiss have also become enamoured of a new way of walking that requires perfecting technique.  Re-learning to walk at the age of 40 is precisely the sort of challenge that appeals deeply to the Swiss.

Ultimately, Nordic Walking emerges as a pastime virtually custom-designed for the Swiss – one resting on the bedrock of traditional Swiss vigor and adorned with the potential for high investments of cash (in complicated gear) and time (in perfect technique).  

The more apt question, then, is why its arrival took so long.