Technology

Those bicycles (called 'ladcycler') are remarkably useful. People use them for all sorts of things, including transporting their kids to and from kindergarten etc. I've never tried it myself, but the kids always look like they're having a blast.

The thing is, everything - including supermarkets - tends to be smaller here, but also dotted everywhere. I've got like three different places for daily grocery shopping within easy walking distance (ten minutes each way), and I'm sort of in the suburbs.

When it comes to trash, public sanitation services are rather effective here. Trash is sorted into paper/cardboard, glass, plastic, organic waste and other. All of them are routinely picked up on different schedules. The first three are recycled, organic waste is either composted or fermented for biogas production with is then used to heat homes or fuel local public transportation (busses). The last category is burned at high temperatures, with the exhaust heavily filtered and the resulting energy used to provided house heating and / or hot water. There are three more infrequent trash collection cycles: Potentially dangerous materials (chemicals, paint, batteries, e-waste), gardening waste (again, composting or biogas - lots of people with gardens do their own composting too - the containers and worm cultures are provided by the municipality for free) and lastly 'large trash'. This is stuff like furniture, fridges, washing machines etc. That's picked up once every month on a specific date. A lot of people recycle or upcycle locally by napping stuff before it's hauled off (which is legal and encouraged).

All in all, a lot of these things are taken care of by people specializing in it and funded by taxes. We pay more in taxes here, but we also get a lot more services in return.

If people know they're going to be creating lots of waste of a given type - home improvement or construction - you can have a container delivered and picked back up for a fairly modest fee. Similarly, moving homes is generally handled by dedicated companies in standardized moving crates provided by them. It's not particularly expensive.