Packaging a revolution.

• Author: Ryan, Megan
• Position: Waste management and recycling

Germany's packaging ordinance has produced some maddeningly unanticipated results, and left both manufacturers and environmentalists dissatisfied. But it represents the first, tenuous foothold for an important idea - one that may eventually be recognized as essential to a sustainable society.

German consumers have begun to notice some subtle but important changes in the aisles of grocery and drug stores over the past two years. A popular brand of ice cream, formerly sold in plastic tubs ensconced in boxes, now comes without the outer boxes. Bottles of perfume, which used to come wrapped in tissue paper inside boxes, are now displayed au naturel. A fertilizer box was redesigned to use less cardboard, saving 30 tons a year of wood pulp. Reusable plastic shipping containers are replacing cardboard trays and breakable wooden pallets, a change that could eliminate more than a million tons of packaging waste each year.

What brought about this sudden, ecologically-conscious creativity? Although some manufacturers insist that these changes flowed solely from the goodness of their green corporate hearts, they were also spurred by a powerful legislative kick. Big business was forced to network its wasteful habits by a 1991 decree - aptly named the German Ordinance for the Avoidance of Packaging Waste - requiring manufacturers to re-use packaging or bear the costs of having it recycled.

Much of Northern Europe is making a fundamental shift in its approach to waste, and Germany is on the cutting edge of that change. Instead of viewing discards as consumers' waste, Northern European nations now consider them the manufacturer's responsibility. If the manufacturer made it, the rationale goes, the manufacturer should be responsible for the product throughout its life cycle, meaning that industries, not municipal governments, must be the ones to keep it out of dumps and incinerators. Germany has tackled the problem by designing a manufacturer-funded system to correct packaging waste for recycling, entirely separate from the public trash collection system.

But Germany has a ways to go before the accolades begin rolling in for its progressive ideas. The same consumers who see slimmed-down containers in the grocery store are watching a markedly different packaging saga on the evening news: the new system has collected so much plastic packaging waste since the law passed that it is piling up much faster than it can be used. Other nations are watching circumspectly to see how Germany handles the hard part of its packaging reform: figuring out how to make sure that the waste materials that are recovered are efficiently re-introduced into the product cycle.

An Avalanche of Trash

As manufacturers use more and more wrappings trimmings in an effort to increase the convenience and marketability of their products, packaging has become the fastest growing portion of the waste stream. It makes up one-third to one-half of municipal wastes in industrialized countries. In the United States alone, it has more than doubled since 1960. This explosion has been fueled by cheap materials and a system that gives manufacturers little incentive to cut down on packaging. They don't have to worry about it once it's in a consumer's bag, so why worry about using elaborate packaging to help get it there?

Although the United States has few rivals in waste production (it averaged 864 kilograms per person in 1989), concern over what to do about waste is greater in Northern Europe. Although Europeans each threw out a comparatively low 327 kilograms of trash in 1989, the costs of both landfill space and waste incineration in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Ireland well exceed those in the United States.

In Germany, for example, it costs up to 730 marks ($450) per ton to incinerate waste in new facilities. Although landfill fees average 100 marks ($60) per ton, charges vary by location. Some regions have to pay landfill fees of up to 410 marks ($250) per ton to send trash to landfills outside their jurisdiction, and a lack of open space near population centers makes future landfill sites unlikely. Waste incineration isn't a viable option either, because of virulent public opposition and incineration's high cost.

Political Packaging

The realization that they are running out of space and money to bury trash has thrust more and more governments into the business of recycling - and figuring out how to prevent waste from being created in the first place. Germany, which today produces more than 23 million tons of household wastes a year, began anticipating a garbage crunch in the 1970s. It passed legislation in 1975 and 1986 intended to reduce waste, increase recycling, and allocate costs based on the "polluter pays" principle, but included no mandatory reduction or recycling quotas. Waste kept increasing, landfills reached capacity and incineration prices continued to climb.

In the late 1980s, the German minister of the environment, Klaus Topfer, proposed a system for refillable beverage containers - an extension of a pilot project the government set up in Cologne in 1980. The proposal set minimum refill quotas, ranging from more than 90 percent for mineral water down to 30 percent for milk. But it faced opposition from both the European Community (E.C.) - which can overrule such legislation - and the German packaging industry. The E.C. said that by targeting only beverages, the proposal was an incomplete solution that imposed overly heavy trade burdens...