Again and again tilting.
Whether between the parked truck trailers on Gartenstrasse in Obertshausen, on the sidewalk or on the street: the carelessly discarded cigarette remains are lying around everywhere.
Sometimes they stick so tightly to the ground or jam between cracks that they are difficult to grab with a gripper and put in a blue garbage bag.
Yvonne Smykalla is on the move with a handcart and was already very successful this morning in collecting wild garbage that others left behind in the area between “Burg im Hain”, the railway line and Autobahn 3 (Frankfurt – Würzburg), in the so-called “Kreuzloch”. Together with two dozen other people who, like her, wear neon green safety vests with the label “For a clean environment - # simply bend over”, Smykalla wants to help make the city area cleaner again.
What did the active players find that morning? Plastic packaging, plastic bottles, scraps of paper, cable sheathing and a tool bag can be seen in the garbage bags. Someone simply threw a used car air filter, a honey pot, a rather new-looking Tupper bowl with leftover salad dressing and a mobile phone into the landscape. In addition, a number of beer bottles and a few beverage cans rattle in Smykalla's handcart. They can be pushed into the deposit machine in a nearby supermarket and recycled.
Smykalla doesn't like to remember other finds she made in earlier collection campaigns: At places where truck drivers have to wait for long periods in their vehicles, she discovered bottles filled with urine that were parked in the area. Once she poured out a particularly heavy vessel; "I couldn't get the smell out of my nose for days".
# Einfachbücken is the name of the garbage collection initiative founded last year in Obertshausen, of which Smykalla is a member. The name describes what to do if you want to get rid of rubbish. How did that happen? “I slipped into it like that,” says the initiator Undine Zimmer. When her son started school, she walked a lot. “Then you can see how much rubbish there is here.” At some point that bothered her: Zimmer began to collect and dispose of wild rubbish on the way home. She posted photos of the rubbish lying around on the Internet under the hashtag # simply bend over. As a result, more and more people contacted her who also collected wild garbage or felt addressed.
Zimmer decided to found a group: "Doing something like this together is a lot more fun than alone." Zimmer and her colleague Bettina Justus put the number of active participants in such campaigns at around 50 The number of those who think #simplybend over is a good thing is far greater: The group has more than 300 members on Facebook and around 450 on Instagram.
They didn't want to start an association, says the 45-year-old civil engineer Zimmer, who works as a project manager at Telekom.
Rather, the initiative joined the Naturfreunde Obertshausen as a specialist group.