After Spargel Ritter went bankrupt: More than 500 tons of garbage disposed of in Bornheim

Farmer Klaus Langen deliberately left the oversized strawberries and asparagus stalks on the roof of his processing hall at a height of around five meters. “We are now in the process of starting a whole new chapter here in Brehmstrasse,” he explains. And that includes strawberries and asparagus again. Langen is the owner of the large hall and the adjoining area, where “Sabine and Claus Ritter GbR” had registered their headquarters until March. Since then, the Bonn attorney Andreas Schulte-Beckhausen has ruled here as insolvency administrator. He had started with the hope of being able to save the company with an investor. In the meantime, however, the company has been closed and the entire mobile company inventory was auctioned at an online auction. Only the garbage remained.

The Bonner Rundschau has reported on it several times. Most recently, in June, the city of Bornheim and the Rhein-Sieg district gave each other the buck because of the garbage. The insolvency administrator also waved it off. As Schulte-Beckhausen told Rundschau earlier, there was so much garbage on the site before the bankruptcy. In the worst case, at the end of the bankruptcy proceedings, the owner of the area would have to be responsible for disposing of the garbage, it said. And this very worst case has happened.

Several containers per week

“On October 1st, we took over our area again and started the clean-up work here,” Langen reported. He has since disposed of more than 500 tons of garbage. “But we’re not finished yet,” says the 52-year-old farmer from Kerpen-Buir. Heavy container transporters with a capacity of 40 cubic meters still drive up several times a week to load and collect the sorted garbage. “We’ll be through soon,” says Langen.

In 2003 he leased the processing hall including the 11,000 square meter site on Brehmstrasse to Sabine and Claus Ritter. But not only that after the bankruptcy he was left with the trash of the Sabine and Claus Ritter GbR. “Some people actually felt called to dump more rubbish here,” Langen complains. He really does not know what is going on in the minds of individual people. In order to counteract further garbage dumping, he had to fence the entire area. “Fortunately, there was no hazardous waste.” Mostly it was agricultural film that was once used to cover strawberry and asparagus fields. “My son Alexander has done a huge job here in the past few weeks and achieved great things,” Langen praised. The 23-year-old was in charge of the clean-up operation. By the end of the year at the latest, the last accumulations of garbage should have disappeared. “Then we want to have finished the chapter tidying up here,” said Langen.

The farmer expects the new asparagus season to start at the end of April 2021. And it will not be long before the first strawberries can be harvested. Klaus Langen is not only the owner of the processing hall, which he will be operating again next year. “We had leased arable land in the immediate vicinity on a total area of ​​over ten hectares,” he explains. He’s now farming them himself again.

Langen grew up in agriculture in Bornheim. “We lived on Schillerstrasse,” he says. His parents and grandparents were farmers. “My grandmother even met her future husband during the asparagus harvest in Alfter,” reports the 52-year-old. Today Langen lives in Kerpen-Buir. There he also has his fruit and vegetable business and his farm shop. And there he would like to market the agricultural products grown in Bornheim in the future.

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