It has not taken a long time for most of us to realize that the public administration in Leuven can be quite clumsy, bulky and burdensome. I have seen many more examples of this throughout my nine months of residence in Leuven. However, one administrative field has caught my attention which in my opinion was somewhat successful; recycling in Leuven as I have seen is a partial success story where people are obliged by the government to sort out their garbage into paper, glass, recyclable and non-recyclable.

The incentive of sorting out your garbage is that the brown (non-recyclable substances) bags’ prices are much higher than the blue (recyclable substances) bags. Although there may have been those who have tried to buy the cheaper bags all the time, I have been told that there is a mechanism of warning and punishment. What is exciting for someone from Southeastern Europe is that people here seem to be doing the whole process automatically as it is something that is embedded in their culture and is part of their lives. This is not only the case with brown and blue bags but for paper and glass as well.

I would like to pose one question publicly however; why is it that the brown bags are ridiculously expensive since there is another, much cheaper and still efficient way of doing the whole process. Why can’t we pay the blue bag price and get one type of bag for both and take our garbage out on different days (as we have already been doing) so that the garbage men still know what kind of garbage we are taking out and they can still check if the garbage is sorted out properly anyway? Recycling policy in Leuven seems to be working fairly well. It is for us (international students) to observe what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ in the society of Leuven so that we can understand our own mistakes and try to correct them in our hometowns. For the Leuven folk, the fact that a certain policy is not bad does not necessarily mean that it cannot be improved. It is hence for you to think and talk to international students to be able to have the chance to find out how things are being done in different places and how you can improve the administration here.