Recycling rubbish - Germany's recycling program

Reason, May, 1994 by Lynn Scarlett

Even before the take-back law, this had been gradually changing. In most German towns and cities, residents could deposit in special drop-off bins glass containers and newsprint for recycling. But most packaging went into the standard trash bin. That has now changed dramatically.

Monnig points out the window to a row of the DSD's yellow bins. One bin smiles back, a grin and eyes painted across its front. "Our recycling family," he says. "We have 120,000 to 130,000 bins out there serving Berlin's 2.5 million inhabitants." In 1992, before the take-back law took full effect, Monnig's company collected some 257,000 tons of materials in the recycling bins; in 1993, it collected 358,000 tons.

Measured by the amount of material collected in the recycling bins, the DSD program is a resounding success. Germans shifted nearly 6 million tons of their trash from the municipal bins--destined for disposal--to the yellow DSD bins. In July 1993, Environment Minister Topfer proudly announced that Germans "are the trash collectors of the world."

But not all of that trash was usable. About 1.2 million tons of German sales packaging is made of plastics. When the DSD system got fully underway in 1993, Germans began tossing this plastic into the yellow containers beyond all expectations. By year's end, close to half of the plastic packaging had been collected--but not recycled. Germany had a manufacturing capacity to absorb less than 200,000 tons of this plastic detritus. Some of the stuff began showing up at landfills in neighboring France. Some even made its way to Bulgaria. The rest--some 100,000 tons--has piled up in warehouses.

Topfer, undeterred by this warehoused plastic, proclaimed to the German public: "Don't be led astray by these reports of mountains of waste. It's quite right and proper that there should be such a mountain, so carry on filling those yellow sacks."

The cost of recycling that plastic is exorbitant: about $1,700 per ton, and that's excluding some of the especially hard-to-handle plastic discards. By contrast, traditional disposal of plastics costs less than $500 per ton in Germany (and about $100 a ton, on average, in the United States). Furthermore, at 85 cents per pound, recycled plastic is not at all competitive with virgin plastic, which costs around 30 to 40 cents per pound. Allowing hydrogenation of plastics, which turns them back into a basic chemical feedstock, would make recycling much cheaper, but it would still require a subsidy of about $310 a ton.

A more fundamental puzzle is how to avoid a cluster of free-rider problems caused by the take-back scheme. Consumers, who pay a direct fee for regular trash pickup but not for what they discard in the DSD's yellow bins, find them a convenient place to put waste, whether it carries the required green dot or not. "The results of our waste-sorting test were disappointing," Monnig admits. "About 40 percent of what we have been collecting in the yellow bins is not green-dot material." Some of what's collected is packaging that doesn't carry the green dot. Some of it is non-packaging paper. But some of it, says one DSD official, "is just garbage: dead dogs, shoes, rubbish."