​In the first episode, I promised that I would return to the return guarantee system, “segereul”, since it has already entered the common language. Two debut mini-sketches to grab (hopefully!) your attention. Switzerland, somewhere in the early 2000s, so much time has passed since then that I forget the exact date. But not the extraordinary media campaign that accompanied the installation of the first containers for sorting household waste (that is, we are a little late in the field by twenty years, but this does not count).

A big dinosaur and a small dinosaur, mother and son, calmly walked through the forest. One day, a small dinosaur finds a pet – a plastic container. He wants to throw it out into the wild, carefree. His mother suddenly stops him and scolds him. He grabs the pet, puts it on the ground and with a delicate but firm movement flattens it under a thick and heavy sole, because it was not for nothing that the representative of a dinosaur was chosen for the idea of ​​quiet strength.

The media there played the clip to the point of exasperation and exhaustion, for months, during rush hour and beyond. But it worked. Switzerland is among the European countries with the highest level of plastic recovery.

The glass bottle does not sag at all. And cans with juice and beer, light as a butterfly’s wing, are thrown with a vault back

Today we return to Romania, to the Carfur’ store in the Bucharest area. A mother with a five-six-year-old daughter. And not every mother, but delicate and environmentally responsible, carries with her a hemp bag filled with various empty containers: PET, aluminum beer cans and “glass” bottles in which there were exquisite wines, no, I can’t help but cast a furtive and curious glance, as an urban ethnographer.

Blankets easily pass the colorful car test, reception is marked by strange, but musical sounds. The glass bottle does not sag at all. And cans of juice and beer, light as butterfly wings, are flung back and forth, based on some unknown laws of kinetic physics that the engineers who designed the system did not take into account. The mother, devastated and disappointed, puts the return back in the bag. The little girl seems happy because she saw the machine take the objects in her nostril, but also scared by it. All around, pensioners, a security guard and a cashier start whispering: “the days of Ceausescu are coming back.”

Now let’s get back to serious stuff. SGR was officially launched on November 30 last year. I didn’t understand very well then, and I still don’t know now, whether it was a public-private partnership or whether it was an initiative of the Romanian state. In other words, if someone wants to make money on it, holy profit, or spend (lose) financial resources on a noble, “environmentally friendly” goal – sorry for the pleonasm, but con Iancu Caragiale knows why. But these things do not interest me.

I would like to discuss some aspects of the implementation, perception and functioning of this system. As I said before, the stakes are huge, it’s about cleaning this country of plastic waste in the medium to long term.

I start with the existing communication at the time of starting this project.

What kind of communication, actually? Above I mentioned the clip with the two dinosaurs that gets stuck in your brain regardless of your intelligence level, age, profession, training, etc. For the Romanian SGR, apart from being a very “subtle” advertising campaign, it was also a cumbersome official work. It was rather a call to the army than an action of civic responsibility addressed, I repeat, to everyone.

Second, the infrastructure itself is a big problem, as the space to assemble small shops is… small

Second, the infrastructure itself is a big problem, because the assembly facilities for small shops are… small, the assembly machines are expensive and, as far as I can tell, complex, with a high level of maintenance. I wonder with some typical Romanian masochism what will happen in the summer, at 45 degrees (in the shade!) with mixed juices, beer, coke, tutti frutti pouring in and out of the car collection containers outside.

I am not an expert in the anthropology of the gesture of sampling, but there are very serious works written on this topic. But in such cases, convenience and reliability are of great importance, the user quickly loses confidence if something goes wrong or fails. How you collect shows who you really are on an individual and national level.

The third: the symbol (icon) “package with guarantee” is small, very small, almost illegible.

I suspect there was an uphill battle between the designers, RetuRO and the brand manufacturers to make room for this somewhere on the packaging. The result is reliable, it seems that the machine reads it, but a big bet was missed: a person does not see it, literally and figuratively. The sign “guaranteed packaging” remained only an indicator, but lost its iconic and symbolic image. I dream of a communication campaign where this will be printed on t-shirts that will be offered to users for free. I dream, of course, that the country burns on comedy, not on recycling.

Fourth, big retailers have adapted surprisingly well to the new environment, to their credit.

Romanian spontaneous “stability” is not denied this time either. Being a pessimist-optimist of sorts, I believe that things will continue to improve, mistakes and natural flaws will be corrected along the way, etc. The big problem is still the village shops scattered all over the country, which will never have the logistical potential to implement this project. There is weeping and gnashing of teeth, in fact, tons of plastic are carelessly thrown into forests, rivers or fields. If we don’t solve this problem, we have missed the project.

On another, deeper level, what (I think) escaped those who thought and implemented this huge but important project, I repeat, is the “representation” we have of packaging, household waste and the gesture of recycling, plus its national specificity. A German does not recycle like a Portuguese, and an Italian like a Finn. Romania passed through communism, its memorial traces remain, with good and bad. Do you remember the bottle of milk, yogurt, mineral water that was given “in exchange”? Now in Europe, there is a whole debate about “returnable packaging”, whether it is useful or not. When I look at her, I smile. We were “resilient” even before sustainability was born, but we lack the courage and strength to even symbolically integrate the good that happened then?

The new official environmental discourse tells us that recycling is an inherently ethical gesture. It’s just that people don’t really care about ethics

The most important aspect is the way in which we present our waste and the gesture of recycling it. Is it a thing to be pitied and despised, or a resource? Does the gesture itself indicate that you are “poor” and every penny counts, or, on the contrary, education and care for the environment? These ideas are determined by our national culture, the matrix in which we were formed, social relations, etc.

Yes, the new official environmental discourse tells us that recycling is an inherently ethical gesture. It’s just that people don’t care much about ethics unless they’re forced or incentivized to recycle. For now, we chose the second path, but forgot to analyze the views we mentioned above.

I’m really afraid that now the “perceptions” of those who actually do the redesign are not the same as those of administrators, service technicians, etc., let alone those who thought about the launch and communication campaign of the program as it was. As long as there is inconsistency, a conflict of ideas, the project will operate with the handbrake as it is now, it will create frustration and disappointment. And this should not be, his rate exceeds all of us, both actors and participants. These are “real” ecology, ideas that we should all support and promote. The rest, as I said, are seminars, projects and colloquiums.

N. Red: Mirel Banika is a researcher in the field of anthropology of religions.