Recycling rubbish.

• Author: Scarlett, Lynn
• Position: Germany's recycling program

Why Germany's "market-oriented" recycling scheme can't transform trash into treasure

It looks like garbage: bits of torn paper, piles of plastic stuff, crumpled aluminum foil, squashed cans, broken glass. It even smells like garbage--not as bad as the odor at some landfills, but a detectable putrid aroma nonetheless. It is, however, not garbage. Not, at least, according to German law.

These mountains of miscellany, some stacked neatly in towering bales and some amassed in great heaps, have become "valuable materials" by edict of the German government. Now workers sort through the stuff as it pours down a conveyor belt; they separate the plastic from the glass, the aluminum from the paper waste. "For us," says a manager at a Berlin waste sorting facility, "the hard part is the 'light fraction'--the plastics and composite paper packaging. We basically have rows of workers separating different package types by hand."

In 1991, riding a wave of waste-avoidance sentiment, Klaus Topfer, Germany's minister of the environment, declared waste a useful resource. The German legislature then approved a law making whoever places a package into commerce responsible for taking it back. Passed on June 12, 1991, the Packaging Ordinance requires manufacturers or retailers to "take back" their packaging or ensure that 80 percent of it is collected rather than thrown out. Then 80 percent of what's collected has to be reused or recycled.

The ordinance covers all packaging, around 150 billion individual packages discarded each year in Germany, about 40 percent of the country's garbage. That translates into 12 million tons of material: yogurt containers, toothpaste tubes, detergent boxes, chip bags, bottles, boxes, pallets, wrappers.

The law would have required every supermarket, every drug store, every auto-parts retailer, every stationery shop to accept customers' garbage. Appalled at the prospect of transforming retailers into waste handlers, consumer-product manufacturers came up with an alternative way to satisfy the law's requirements. They established a consortium--Duales System Deutschland--to collect the packaging waste. To fund the DSD, manufacturers charge themselves for each package sold. Those who pay the fee put a special "green dot" logo on their packages, indicating that consumers should discard them in industry-sponsored collection bins.

The green-dot program costs more than $2.5 billion a year--more than $100 for a household of four, an amount that approaches the taxes or fees already paid for regular waste-collection service. And that money covers collection costs only. It does not include the cost of redesigning packages and changing production systems. Waste Environment Today, a British trade publication, reports that real consumer prices for some packaged products have jumped 13 percent since the take-back law took effect. And one consumer-products manufacturer suggests that set-up costs to meet the take-back requirements come to more than 1 percent of total revenue. Yet even though the DSD handles virtually all packaging waste, municipal waste collection costs have declined only slightly.

Germany's experiment has captured the imaginations of recycling advocates throughout the world. "The German concept," says one commentator in BioCycle magazine, "has totally swept Europe." The take-back idea has also gained favor in the United States. The Recycling Advisory Council, an arm of the National Recycling Coalition funded partly by the EPA, included the concept in a list of recommended recycling policies for the United States. And in 1992 Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, drafted a bill patterned after the German ordinance. Although the bill did not come to a vote that year, Baucus is likely to resurrect it in future legislation.

"If recycling is going to survive and even prosper, we will need to do more--much more," Baucus told a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National Association of Counties last year. "The cornerstone of my strategy rests on the principle that I call manufacturers' responsibility for the life-cycle of a product....Anyone who sells a product should also be responsible for the product when it becomes waste." President Clinton seems sympathetic to this argument...