WASTEFUL HUNGARY – AND THE REDISCOVERY OF RECYCLING
WASTEFUL HUNGARY – AND THE REDISCOVERY OF RECYCLING

Summary/Abstract: The car-park behind the Fehérvári Road market once held one of the treasures of Communist Hungary, a little ugly metal booth where drunks and homeless people hung around, and which echoed to the boisterous clink of bottles and the rattle of crates, from early morning till late at night. In the mid-1980s, when I first came to Hungary, there was a price tag on almost all bottles, and people dutifully collected them and regularly brought them back to collecting points like this, all over the country. And if a strangeshaped bottle turned up which even the giant-bosomed lady behind the counter did not like the look of, some foreign peanut butter jar or weird former whisky container, the drunks were sure to pounce politely on it, convinced they could find some buyer for it somewhere. In neighbouring Romania, even PET bottles were seen as miraculous when they first appeared. I remember two young hitchhikers near Braşov pleading for my empty mineral water bottle, and insisting I take several new pairs of socks from the factory where they worked in exchange. A vast industry thrived on washing and returning beer, wine, and champagne bottles to circulation. The Communist states seemed light-years ahead of the wasteful west in the green revolution.

• Details
• Contents