How is Germany dealing with its packaging waste? - environment

Whole Earth, Winter, 2002 by Sara Bloom

It's the end of August. Plums and tomatoes are in season, and pumpkins are just starting to come in, so I take a couple of my doth shopping bags and bicycle to the farmers' market near my home in Heidelberg. On my way back, I stop at the supermarket. I buy a bar of chocolate wrapped in paper and aluminum, a jar of yogurt, herring in a plastic container, a box of rigatoni, a bottle of wine, envelopes wrapped in cellophane, and a plastic bottle of shampoo.

This glass, plastic, aluminum, and paper will somehow have to be handled. Despite a heightened awareness of the problem of packaging, the people of Heidelberg produce 30,024 tons of household trash yearly. My share comes to 503 pounds. In 1991, Germany's garbage reached crisis proportions. Germany, a small, heavily populated country with little land left for landfills, had begun to ship its garbage to France. Even the conservative government realized it had to devise a more neighborly solution. It issued the Packaging Ordinance, requiring manufacturers and distributors to take back and dispose of all packaging, in or near the place of purchase, free of cost to consumers.

The government hoped this would add to the cost of goods, and motivate business to dispense with excessive packaging. Industry developed a two-pronged response, known as the Dual System Deutschland (DSD). The DSD established a nonprofit company to collect fees by licensing a logo (the Green Dot, or Grune Punkt), and a for-profit division to collect, separate, recycle, and process the waste. A Green Dot symbol (in fact, two intertwined arrows that aren't always green) printed on all products for which manufacturers have paid recycling fees in advance, alerts householders that they can place those items in curbside collection bins.

I throw all packaging with the green dot into a yellow plastic bag printed with the names and pictures of three types of packaging: metal (including tin and aluminum cans, bottle tops, and tin foil), containers (juice and milk cartons and freezer packaging), and plastic (bottles, cups, and Styrofoam). A large notice on the bag asks me to clean the packaging before disposing of it, and reminds me not to throw glass or paper into the bag.

Even with regional variations, the law applies to the whole country. Parts of Bavaria use separate containers for metal cans. Because Heidelberg has its own compost plant, food garbage is collected separately (the side of the collection truck offers the uncharacteristically humorous information, "We turn food into Humus Heidelbergensis"). Since there's also a container on my street for aluminum and tin foil, they don't go into the yellow bag.

Large disposal units for glass and paper are located within a few blocks of every house, and aluminum and battery containers are also accessible. For those who prefer to remove excess packaging in the store, supermarkets and drugstores have disposal units at the exits. Apartment buildings are fined if they're found not to have separated garbage properly.

The 1991 Packaging Ordinance made sorting a part of everyday life. It also addressed one of the fastest growing types of packaging, metal cans. Every year, Germans use six billion of them. Lined up end to end, they'd circle the Earth sixteen times. Cans for beer, soda, fruit drinks, and mineral water are made of tinplate, sometimes lined with plastic; their covers and tabs are aluminum.

The Ministry of the Environment issued a report in 1995 on the "life" of a can--from bauxite mining, which destroys vast areas of forest in Third World countries, to manufacturing, which releases tons of heavy metal and dioxin into the air. The report concluded that the production of cans is an environmental and humanitarian disaster. Even recycled, cans aren't worth much. At best, they can be turned into low-quality metal for construction work and wire.

The Packaging Ordinance attempted to force industry to reduce use of metal cans by permitting the government to require a can deposit if the number of refillable glass or plastic containers drops below 72 percent of all containers.

In 1991, almost 72 percent of all containers were refillable, but by 2001 this figure had fallen to 63 percent. The Green Party, in coalition with the Social Democrats, decided to enforce the law (against heavy opposition from industry). As of January 2003, customers will have to pay an extra 25-cent deposit per can. Counting the deposit, drinks in refillable containers will now be cheaper than drinks in cans.

Like most people here, I assumed that with the Packaging Ordinance everything would be magically recycled, shrinking the amount of garbage to where it would no longer be a problem. In fact, the amount of packaging decreased in the first five years after the Ordinance, but increased in the following five years, as people assumed they were doing enough by sorting Green Dot products. The amount of garbage continues to grow.

BETTER NAKED THAN PACKAGED

BUND (Bund fur Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland; or "German Association for the Protection of the Environment and Nature"), a division of Friends of the Earth International, says that Germans recycle a third of their trash. But, according to BUND Heidelberg's Aktion Unverpackt, (the "Campaign to Eliminate Packaging"), recycling is not a solution to the garbage problem, because its environmental and financial costs are too high, and because there is still no large-scale reuse of plastics and aluminum.