Cardboard Chaos

30 October 2026

Inconvenience leads to a life lesson, again. A few months back, I had an ordinary experience that completely rewired my brain. My husband and I got up early one morning to put out the paper and cardboard for collection. It was my first time participating and, frankly it surprised me how seriously he took the process. You see, Switzerland takes waste management very seriously, and in turn so do its citizens. Each canton has specific regulations about how to dispose of waste, including a fairly nuanced glass recycling system that keeps me up at night. There is a recycling map where you can enter your postal code and find where to recycle 40 different types of collectibles. There’s a video on a government website that asks, “What if trash was treated with Swiss precision?” I think you get the point. So on this particular morning, we awoke bright and early to ensure that the paper and cardboard were properly wrapped for collection. As an example, here are the regulations for Zürich. If you’re old enough, think back to the days of newspaper piles at home, stacked and wrapped in twine for collection. That is exactly how paper and cardboard must be wrapped. Mind you, in our canton this collection only happens every two weeks on Wednesdays. It’s a process. The Monday before our wedding, most of my possessions finally arrived after being shipped in cardboard boxes from D.C. In addition, the weekend before that, we went to Zürich to pick up more boxes and furniture from friends who had kindly offered space in their shipping container. I should have taken a picture of our apartment, we were drowning in moving paper, masking tape and bubble wrap, the floor barely visible. The weekend before collection day, my husband and I broke down the boxes and, as required by regulation, removed every piece of packing tape on each box, then folded the boxes and placed them in a pile we could manage to carry down our four flights of stairs. Hubby wrapped each pile of boxes in twine as required by the regulation. However, because our apartment is small, I got irritated and thought it would be a brilliant idea to move some of the boxes down to the cellar. And so back to where we started, our early morning wrapping piles of cardboard. On this particular morning, with my husband dressed for work and me dressed for returning to bed, we went down to the cellar to pull up our piles of paper. Lo and behold, we also need to break down the cardboard boxes I had insisted we move down to the cellar. And so the boxes breakdown began again. And it was in that moment I had a realization about the convenience of life in America. Photo courtesy of University of Zürich. D.C. Recycling In D.C. my trash collection was two doors down from my apartment in a luxury building (thank you COVID discount rates). The trash shoot whisked away my uncharted, un-composted plastic bag half empty because it just smelled too bad to keep any longer. The ease of getting rid of the trash meant I didn’t really think about it once it was gone. Even for the recycling. In D.C. we have multi stream recycling, and in theory there’s a machine that sorts out the different pieces, and so in my luxury building we would simply toss our Trader Joe’s bags full of PET plastic, glass wine bottles and cardboard into a single container that was cleared each day. And that was it, I never thought about the recycling, what happened, who sorted through the different types of plastic, or whether at the end of the day any of my waste was actually recycled. It just disappeared. Prior to living in the luxury building, I lived in a rent-controlled building built in the 1950s, without air-conditioning, a single laundry room on the basement floor and no trash shoot. This meant, I had to walk to the back of building carrying my trash and my recycling to throw them out in the containers behind the building. At the time, I thought that was inconvenient. Ha! What I’ve learned In the clearest moment of the morning, once my brain reached 80 % utilization capacity, I realized that life in America is almost comically convenient, especially for people who can afford to throw money at things they don’t want to do. There’s something important about understanding how much waste you generate, and being responsible for contributing to its management and discarding. I’m now acutely aware of how many boxes and and how much tape we used for my move. It may not be a core memory, but the consistency of that bi-weekly knowledge of how much waste I’m producing because I’m responsible (in part) for its removal is healthy. That’s the only word I can think of now. It’s healthy. I haven’t even touched on how much trash bags cost as part of an effort to discourage too much waste. Other countries think about waste differently than America, and you can only really see that once you travel or live elsewhere. For instance, in Japan, for several reasons, some including safety, travelers are meant to carry all the waste they produce until they return to their hotel. Several people I know traveled to Japan and remarked that the experience of being held responsible for their trash had a profound impact. As I enter month five in Switzerland, I’m realizing, Swiss culture is not just in the cheese (so much cheese) but also in how the communities choose to engage with the world, their values and how through seeming inconvenience, they teach lessons that last a life time. Have you ever experienced an inconvenience that made you reassess your values?Share your thoughts and stories below. Originally published on Substack on Nov 17, 2025.