Here’s a fun Dutch-based instagram account for you: the Mistress of mattresses: French woman Nastassja Guay Bonnabel draws naked women and men, both alone or together in all kinds of different configurations and poses on discarded mattresses in Amsterdam and clearly also abroad.

For over a year now, she’s been roaming the streets of the Dutch capital, looking for all kinds of mattresses to doodle on. Your old mattress could be next.

(Link: vice.com, Photo Mistress of mattresses)

A park in Utrecht that apparently didn’t have enough trash in it had some trash added to it by the city to make sure that beer giant Inbev could have a proper team building session picking up rubbish.

Imagine being a neighbour watching city employees dump trash into a park for the sake of some company’s team building outing and busloads of white collar employees having fun picking up the trash like problem youth doing community service.

The city of Utrecht admitted it was a bad call to dump more trash in the park, although they still did. They are probably only saying this because they got caught doing it. The idea of putting trash into a park to then have it picked up again is retarded.

To make things worse Inbev claims it knew nothing about the extra trash and would not have gone through with it if they had known, which is plausible. Either way Inbev was stuck dealing with a load of rubbish. The employees, who were geared up to do a good deed, can now team build on the feeling of having been screwed over.

(www.welingelichtekringen.nl)

Pumerend, the town with the owl attacking everyone, has more worries on its hands: their budget for dustbins. Having decided to remove 431 of the 1011 dustbins to save 150,000 euro on emptying them, Pumerend is asking its residents to adopt dustbins so that they can stay in place.

Adopting a dustbin isn’t code for paying for it to stay in place while already paying for rubbish removal, that would be crazy talk. It means emptying on a regular basis, picking up any rubbish within a five meter radius, cleaning it, removing any stickers on it and a few other things you can read about in Dutch.

(Link: nieuws.nl)

Following the trend of protesting or trying to shed light on issues by setting up a Facebook page, a resident of Amsterdam’s De Pijp district who lives on the Van der Helstplein (Van der Helst square) has had enough of the heaps of trash accumulating there and has set up a Facebook page called Van der Helst-belt.

The square is full of restaurants and cafes, which would explain the preponderance of trash, but not why it isn’t picked up often enough or on time. The other problem is that people tend to put out their trash every day, which goes against the rules of that area.

Trash is a complicated business in Dutch cities. In Nijmegen for example, unless it has changed recently, residents pay extra money to use city-approved trash bags, which you buy at the regular store, so basically you pay for what you throw out. In places like Amsterdam, you pay a flat fee per year depending on the make-up of your household. In my co-blogger ultraposh neighbourhood it’s a Wednesday-Saturday affair, while in my lesser yet decent part of town, I can go across the street anytime and put it in one of the three underground bins.

(Link: www.rtvnh.nl)

Have you ever hesitated to throw something in the trash because although you personally no longer had any use for it, it was still usable?

The incentive prize of the 2010 Dutch Design Awards was won by Waarmaker’s Simon Akkaya and his Goedzak, a transparent bag that you can use to put usable things out with the rest of the trash. Since it is transparent and has a bright yellow band, it should immediately draw the attention of any passer-by.

Not that lack of attention seems to be that much of a problem. In my experience when I have to throw away something like an old keyboard or tennis racket I just wait for a dry night and then put it out in the street by itself. The good stuff gets picked up in no time.

The name Goedzak, literally ‘good bag’, is a pun because it also means ‘kindly person’.

(Photo: degoedzak.nl. Link: Bright and Pop-Up City)