Exciting topic today!

9

Waste management. 

It's not the sort of thing we'd paid much attention to when planning a vacation; but when considering a permanent move, it's one of the (many) items that, quite literally, kept Scott up at night before our departure.

As a responsible dog owner, and a Concerned Citizen of Planet Earth, the question of what to do with our waste was a big one for Scott. 

From a strictly pragmatic, day-to-day standpoint, the thought process was along the lines of,

"Call me crazy, but I don't want to move to a new country and start leaving dog poop behind me everywhere I take Josie." 

(The dog poop issue did not keep Amy up at night. She had faith there would be a solution.)

From a bigger picture standpoint: Is there recycling in Portugal? How does that work? Where do we take our trash and how often?

In St. Louis, poop disposal was a non-issue. We'd bag it and drop it in a garbage can at any of the area parks we'd walk to. If we didn't get to a park, we'd bring it home and leave it outside in a small receptacle we bought for that purpose until the weekly pickup came around. 

Life here is a different ball game. There's no "outside" that's ours. 

From St. Louis, we knew only that:

• the front door of our apartment building opens directly to a public sidewalk

  and

• our "balconies" were basically non-existent - putting a small container out there would be difficult at best. Doing so would also hamper our ability to have the window open.

Our ““toe balcony.” We’ve got 10 cm - about 4 inches - of space between our window's edge and the railing.

Until we actually arrived at our apartment, the question of how to manage Josie's twice-daily offerings was very much unanswered.

It turns out to be a non-issue here as well. 

Lisbon is a pretty clean city in our experience and one of the reasons why are these things:

They're ubiquitous and there's one just a few doors down from us. (Worth noting: the concept of "doors down" is very different here than in our previous neighborhoods. The door next to the one we use to enter our building is less than a meter - maybe two feet - away.)

Seeing that garbage can was a huge relief for Scott amidst the turbulent first few hours in the country (lost luggage, technicians arriving to set up internet, meeting our apartment manager ...).

Bigger picture, the news is also good. Recycling is definitely a thing here and we recycle items we didn't in the US, like Styrofoam (!) and plastic bags. It's a color-coded receptacle system. In the airport, it looks like this:

On the streets, it looks like this:

We haven't actually seen this in action but it looks as though these cans are on platforms that sink below the sidewalk, which would be fascinating to watch.

Our apartment building has three small, roller containers - one each with blue, yellow, and gray tops - in the basement as well.

Interestingly - and we don't know if this is a product of a culture that revolves around frequent trips to the grocery store, fresh food, and fewer kitchen sink garbage disposals (thus a tendency towards smellier waste) or if it has to do with generally smaller living spaces and less room for storage - there is a garbage pickup every day of the week except Sunday. The pickups tend to occur around 1 or 2 am.

Our apartment/block/neighborhood’s schedule looks like this:

The biggest issue for us so far has been that paper and cardboard are only picked up once a week. WIth so many package deliveries, the small roller container is well-stuffed.

The detail-oriented Portuguese speakers among you have doubtless noticed that glass is not picked up at our apartment. Good catch!

Glass in residential areas is brought to large street-side containers:

Most of the glass containers look like this one. Some have been painted in colorful designs. The one nearest our apartment, for some reason, looks completely different in both shape and color.

Its disposal results in a lovely melody:

As we got used to the workings of the building, we noticed our containers moved from the basement to the pickup point on the street between about 19h00 and 21h00 and they were almost always back in the basement by 07h00. How they moved was a complete mystery for several weeks (House elves? Gremlins?) until Amy was walking Josie around 06h00 and saw a man drive up on a motorcycle, hop off, and bring the can in through the front door. Who he is and where he comes from are tbd …

That’s all for now.

Love from Lisbon,

Scott and Amy