recycling

The Germans are regarded as highly exemplary as regards waste separation. A profitable business with raw materials and even a contribution to climate protection result from the good resolution to cope with the mountains of waste.

“If there is not enough work to do, get people to sort rubbish,” whinges Bernhard Sawatzki. The 45-year-old from Duisburg is standing in a queue, his shopping trolley full of empty plastic bottles. A discount supermarket has put up a machine that shreds the polyethylene terephthalate bottles, PET for short, and gives customers a voucher for the one-way deposit. “The Chinese make them into fleece sweaters,” says Thomas Wilke. The 16-year-old pupil thinks the deposit system is good. “It’s better than putting everything into the rubbish.”

Play of colours

Collect, separate, sort. The Germans have become a nation of rubbish sorters since 1990 under the then Environment Minister Klaus Töpfer, who oversaw the introduction of the German Packaging Ordinance. The aim was to reduce the growing mountains of waste, which is why rubbish was sorted by colour with yellow bins or sacks for packaging, blue bins for waste paper, green or brown bins for compostible waste, grey bins for residual waste, and bottle banks for white glass, brown glass and green glass. Alongside them, there are often used clothing and shoe banks put up by private institutions. And, as mentioned above, there are PET bottle collection points in supermarkets.

“Why do they do it?” one might ask oneself. “In the long term, it is not energy that will be in short supply, but raw materials,” replies Professor Karlheinz Scheffold, expert for Recycling and Waste Management at the University of Applied Sciences in Bingen. We are talking about secondary raw materials here: glass - waste paper, plastic, tin, aluminium and other materials obtained from waste and put back into the economic cycle, which is why it is called a recycling economy. “Urban mining” is the term experts use to refer to the idea of using urban waste as a “mine” for obtaining raw materials. According to Institut der Deutschen Wirtschaft (IDW) estimates made in 2007, the use of these secondary raw materials means that primary raw materials worth 3.7 billion euro have not had to be used.

Great ecological value

In the euphoria of the early years, many dumps were renamed “recycling centres” without further ado by their operators, and rubbish collection vehicles suddenly became “recyclable waste collectors”. Sceptics poured scorn on this Orwellian Newspeak, but meanwhile, people have calmed down. Not least because the operators of the Dual System, as the recycling system is called, have to provide complete details every year about how much is recycled, i.e. the ecological benefit of all the collecting. According to the latest figures, 68.5 billion megajoules of primary energy was saved in 2007 – the annual requirement of 410,000 Germans. In addition, 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions were avoided. That is the equivalent of the amount a forest twice the size of Hamburg can absorb in a year. Thus, separating rubbish makes an active contribution to protecting the climate.

The Germans are a divided people regarding the sorting of waste, however. “Less than a third of the population refuses to sort,” says expert Scheffold “In contrast, two thirds are willing to do their bit for recycling.” The first third have made life difficult for the recycling business in recent years on account of so-called “impurities”, with all sorts of things landing in the yellow bin: residual waste, scrap metal, paint, varnish and other things had to be picked out by hand in the early days. The Grüne Punkt used to be the symbol that showed that the manufacturer of a product had paid its licence fee to the Dual System. Packaging without the Grüne Punkt was not supposed to go into the yellow bin. However, Germans ignored this and the Bundestag recently decided to give up the obligation to label products. “For consumers, that means that all used sales packaging belongs in the appropriate collection systems,” explains Hansjörg Niess, Spokesman of the Duales System GmbH. So now people are allowed to do what most people have always done anyway.

Are machines better sorters?

18 years after the yellow bin was introduced, experts are discussing whether the system can be maintained in view of the fact that a third of the population refuses to use it, particularly since engineers have already found a high-tech solution to the problem: “The most recent generation of recycling plants can even sort different types of plastics, such as polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene. Mechanical sorting is considerably more efficient than manual sorting,” enthuses Hansjörg Neiss. Dieter Arning, Member of the Board of Landbell AG, a competitor of the Duales System Deutschland GmbH, objects that “While high-tech sorting including separating plastics is better in principle, if everything were to go into one bin to begin with, it would be impossible to avoid a high degree of contamination. That makes mechanical recycling much more difficult and the required quotas are not reached.” And Scheffold sees another danger: “If the system of collecting separated waste is damaged, recycling would not be important anymore either and then the only aim would be to destroy waste ever more cheaply in ever larger waste incineration plants.”