Well, another New Year celebration is behind us. Bins are full or trash, and another new collection calendar is before us. But those new pamphlets can be so blasted hard to read! When does the gray bin pick-up now? And what about that old dead Christmas tree?
Tired of relying on your German neighbors to put their bins out first to know when to put yours out? Well, in the KMC at least, ASK has made it a little easier for us...
ASK is the German trash collector for the KMC area. Every year they change which days, and with what frequency, they come to collect our trash and recyclables. And every year they very kindly send us a paper pamphlet in the mail explaining their services and providing this year's collection calendar. But that thing is really hard to decipher, right?
Well, ASK also offers several options for getting just the information you need for your exact street, in a bunch of different ways:
- You can view a weekly or monthly schedule online.
- You can download and print an easy-to-read PDF.
- You can download a digital calendar file that you can then import into your own iCal, Outlook, Yahoo! or Google calendar.
All of the above options allow you to know exactly when each service is coming, so you can be cool and have your trash out the night before, just like all your German neighbors do!
Sehr cool (very cool)! So, let's get started!
While the ASK website is alles auf Deutsch (all in German), here are the steps to view or download the pickup dates for your street:
- Jump directly to the Abfallkalendar (Waste Calendar) page of the ASK website:
https://www.stadtbildpflege-kl.de/?id=29 - Click the top-left icon: Abfuhrtermine (Pickup Dates):
- Type your street name and click Suchen (Search):
- This is where you decide which option works best for you (see the next two steps):
- You can pretty much ignore the first two options:
- Wochenübersicht (Weekly Overview) and Monatsübersichtare (Monthly Overview) are only for viewing onscreen.
- But PDF-Datei 2024 (PDF File 2024) and iCalendar-Datei (iCalendar File) are sehr hilfreich(very helpful)!
- PDF-Datei 2024 lets you download a printable, easy-to-read, 2-page PDF with all 2024 collection dates.
- And iCalendar-Datei let's you download a digital, importable file with all 2024 collection dates.
- Click whichever option you prefer!
- On the next page, create your custom download file:
- For the iCalendar-Datei download file, select the calendar that you want to import into (basically choose the second option for iCal, and the first option for all others):
- For both download files, select the waste types you have and want on your custom calendar: Most of us have the first option for Restabfall (Residual Waste, your gray bin); the other types only offer a single option:
- Scroll to the bottom and click the green button: either PDF-Datei 2024 laden or iCalendar-Datei laden (laden means Download).
- This will start downloading your custom calendar file to your computer (either a PDF or a .ICS file). Browsers vary how they handle file downloads, but hopefully you are familiar with where your browser puts stuff.
- The PDF is a very easy-to-read, 2-page calendar where each month is a vertical column, and all the days for each month are listed in that column; icons next to each day indicate which trash, if any, will be collected on which day that month. Print and put this somewhere easy to see every day and you are on your way!
- The .ICS file can be imported into any digital calendar you prefer, including iCal (Apple-users only), Outlook, Yahoo!, Google, and more. Once you import the file to your calendar, you can setup reminders to tell you the night before which bins need to go out for the next day's pickup! Each calendar has a different way of importing .ICS files, but here are a few links to get you started:
- Importing into iCal (scroll down to "Import events into a calendar")
- Importing into Outlook
- Importing into Yahoo! calendar (click the "Import events using iCal into Yahoo Calendar" option)
- Importing into Google calendar (skip to "Step 2")
We hope this article helps remove a little bit of stress from living in Germany, and helps make you feel a little bit more like you really live here! We also want to wish you einen schönes neues Jahr (a wonderful new year)!
Image by franz12 / shutterstock.com