Back in the 90's when we ran an Irish Pub in the mountains of Germany we had bins to seperate out our rubbish long before England got its desire to recycle. The Stadt were sh&t hot on policing it and heavy fines were an automatic penalty for non compliance.

There was the usual outcry at the work involved, the problems identifying recyclable stuff and  generally the problems of people quick and slow adapting to a new system but the one that stood out the most was the story of a village Grandmother who was a loyal law abiding citizen who did everything she was supposed to despite not understanding the logic of it, or the reason why.

 

However, at this point of the recycling project which was getting underway, One Stadt authority received a desperate plea for help from this old woman who had been heavily fined for non compliance of the new rules, but who said she was trying desperately hard to fill just one bag with material for recycling and didn't understand why she was being fined.

The Stadt, when they took the trouble to investigate,  found that the grandmother had been spending the previous 6 months cutting out "Der Grüne Punkt" off all the rubbish she had amassed and put them into the plastic bag while throwing all the remaining rubbish in the grey 'general purpose' bin.

 

Sure enough the grandmother had managed to amass literally thousands of "Der Grüne Punkt" labels and had carefully cut them out and placed them in the bag, which despite the number of them still only equated to half a bag.

 

The Stadt were considerate, explained the rules to the Grandmother who immediately understood the error of her actions and the fine imposed was waived and further problems were averted.

 

Is there a moral to this story................... mmmh  maybe.. if it is it has to be that ..........rubbish explanations will create rubbish responses and clarity often requires more than just being clever with words, or ideas. Sometimes it needs to be very simple just to be understood.