The hair that drops in clumps on the floors of some salons in Kiel, a port city in northern Germany, is swept up to be turned into fabrics that filter oil from water. Parents who want to buy their children cloth nappies instead of disposable ones can apply for grants of up to €200 from the local authorities. At the city’s biggest festival last year, the organisers got rid of single-use cutlery and replaced it with a deposit system.
Germany is famed as a world leader in recycling – and Kiel, as I found out during a visit this summer, has some of the most weird and workable plans in the country to deal with its trash. It is the first German city to be declared “zero waste” by the environmental campaign group Zero Waste Europe. The certificate does not mean it has already stopped throwing things away – far from it – but rather that it has a concrete plan for how to do better.
“It’s one step in the right direction,” says Bettina Aust – a Green party politician who was elected president of Kiel city council in June – over a glass of juice made from apples that had been saved from landing in a supermarket bin. “You have to keep thinking further … You cannot stay still.”
Germany has a complicated relationship with waste. Despite its status as a world leader in recycling, Europe’s biggest economy is also one of its dirtiest. In 2021, the average German generated 646kg of waste, while the average EU citizen generated 530kg. Only in four EU countries – Austria, Luxembourg, Denmark and Belgium – did people throw away more.
Dino Klösen, a manager at Kiel’s waste management company ABK, says trends in the country’s consumption can be seen in its bins. Paper recycling bins that would have once been full of newspapers are now bursting with cardboard from delivery packages. “The weight of paper waste has dropped but the volume keeps rising from online shopping,” he says.
Awash with waste, cities like Kiel are exploring ways to throw away less and recycle more of what it does chuck. The city council has announced projects ranging from a ban on single-use items in public institutions, to installing more public drinking fountains, to teaching schoolchildren about waste. It is also encouraging people to make simple changes to their behaviour such as using solid bars of soap instead of buying plastic bottles of the stuff.
Other proposals are more systemic. The city is trialling a “pay as you throw” system where people are charged only for the rubbish they throw in the mixed waste bin. A report from the European Environment Agency last year found only about 30% of Germany is covered by such a scheme, even though areas that were covered saw an average drop in mixed waste of 25%.
“General waste is the most expensive form of rubbish there is,” says Klösen. “We are trying to motivate citizens to throw less waste in the bin by making them pay less for doing so.”
Even though waste-cutting efforts like Kiel’s are fairly novel in Germany, recycling is firmly rooted in the culture. In 2021, Germans collected more than two-thirds of their municipal solid waste to be repurposed – more than any other country in Europe. They burned most of the rest for energy, and dumped just 1% in landfills (the EU average is 16%).
Rajat Handa, a waste consultant with BlackForest Solutions in Berlin, says Germany’s infrastructure for sorting waste and the culture around it are what makes its system the “pinnacle” of waste management. To effectively recycle waste or burn it for energy, he said, you first have to sort it well. “If you are not segregating your waste at source – or if it is not being segregated by the people who are picking up your trash – then all your fancy plans will fall flat on their face.”
Over time, Germans have grown accustomed to sorting their trash, which has been a legal requirement since 2015 and is made easier by a wide range of bins in public spaces and apartment blocks. Waste collectors refuse to take bins that have been filled improperly and leave notes on bags that contain unsuitable items. Nosy neighbours sometimes step in when authorities aren’t paying attention.
Still, not every German recycles, says Handa, who moved to Germany from India in 2019. And even those who do sort their rubbish often get it wrong. A common mistake is putting pizza boxes in the “paper” bin even though they are contaminated by oil and can’t be recycled, says Handa, who has encouraged his flatmates in Berlin to put them in the general waste bin instead. “I still have to remind them almost every week.”
The country’s rules around recycling can create something of a headache for tourists, immigrants and even Germans themselves. Before I moved to Germany in 2017, I recycled only halfheartedly. I rarely rinsed out cans and yoghurt pots. If I bought a meal deal for lunch, I normally put the plastic packaging in a mixed-waste bin instead of hunting for a recycling bin or taking it home.
Most people I knew were similar, or worse. The apathy towards recycling in the UK is strong enough that prime minister Rishi Sunak recently included sorting your rubbish into “seven different bins” in a list of environmental proposals he said he would stop from becoming policy. “We will never impose unnecessary and heavy-handed measures on you, the British people,” he said.
But in Germany, I quickly found, it is less controversial to sort waste than it is to chuck it in the wrong bin. In the half a dozen flats in which I have lived with Germans, none of my flatmates has ever made a fuss about separating their trash. They put paper in the blue bin, food in the green, metal cans and plastic packaging in the yellow and what little general waste remained in the black. We would take electronic waste to special drop-off points. Glass bottles and jars went down the road to big bins that bore stern signs forbidding people from throwing stuff into them on Sundays or in the evenings.
Most glass bottles in Germany are part of a deposit scheme. You pay eight to 15 cents more for a drink, but can reclaim your money by bringing the empty bottles back to the local supermarket, after which they are washed and reused. Not everyone is willing to make the effort – I am not alone in hoarding crates of empty bottles at home for months – but in the end almost all get taken back. There are even “reverse vending machines” in shops and public places, which automatically scan and sort bottles inserted into them, and dispense a voucher for the appropriate deposit (if the bottle is not part of the scheme, it is spat back out).
For those too lazy to return their empties, perhaps after an evening drinking in a park, there is also an informal alternative. Germans regularly leave bottles in orderly piles by bins to be picked up by Flaschensammler, or bottle collectors. Many of these collectors are unhoused or in precarious living situations, claiming deposits on unwanted bottles to supplement low wages or pensions. The system is no substitute for bridging the country’s vast wealth inequality but it helps shift a little money from partygoers to people in poverty while keeping the streets clean.
Germany’s first bottle deposit schemes date back to individual breweries in the early 1900s but only became federal law 20 years ago. The big boost to the country’s recycling system came in 1991, when landfills started to fill up with household waste. The government passed a law to push clean-up costs on to manufacturers and introduced a “green dot” symbol on packaging to show that its maker was paying a fee to collect, sort and recover the waste. The system has spread across the EU.
For all their success sorting their trash, Germans struggle to recycle all of it. The amount of plastic waste in Germany has risen by 64% in the last two decades but the amount recycled has only crept up a little. Meanwhile, the amount burnt has risen nearly seven-fold. Environmental groups have raised fears that the true recycling rate is lower than official figures suggest because they include items unsuitable for recycling and waste shipped abroad.
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“To be the EU frontrunner is something to be proud of, for sure, but there are many caveats,” says Jack McQuibban from Zero Waste Europe, who estimates Germany’s recycling rate to be closer to 60%. “The fact that recycling has sort of flatlined in Germany over the past five or six years is something to be worried about.
“I think you need to worry about complacency,” he adds. “If people feel like they’re doing enough just by recycling, that’s insufficient and inadequate to really tackle the waste crisis.”
On my visit, I got a taste of Kiel’s new waste-free philosophy within half an hour of arriving at the central station. Hunting for a meal that wasn’t falafel from a Dönerladen, Germany’s fast food venue of choice, I stepped into a vegetarian Mexican restaurant that had just shut. The waiters passed me a spinach curry that had been prepared for order but not collected, without expecting me to pay for it. Leftover meals are taken home by staff or handed out to people who need them, one of them explains. “You have to have a little humanity.”
Then there’s Janine Falke, a hairdresser and salon owner in Kiel, who has for two decades watched her customers’ hair fall to the ground and be sent to waste incinerators. What people don’t realise, she says, is that hair has powerful fat-binding properties. “I always found it a shame to dispose of this resource as rubbish.”
During the Covid pandemic, Falke started a company to turn the hair from 30 salons in the city into useful products. She works with a company to process it with machines into mats that can absorb oil and be used as filters in industry or sewers. The project, which has received support from the city, is still being fine-tuned before they start selling. “We have a product that is scalable, but right now we have to work too much with our hands.”
Institutions and businesses need to improve but small behavioural changes can go a long way, says Moritz Dietsch, co-founder of the ResteRitter, a startup in Kiel that “rescues’’ fruit and vegetables that are about to be thrown out and makes marmalade and chutney from them. “The nice thing is that we could solve half the problem overnight if we, as a society, just wanted to do so.”
Germany throws out 11m tons of food each year, 59% of which comes from private households. The federal government plans to halve food waste from people and restaurants by the end of the decade but has so far struggled to make much headway.
Dietsch’s latest project is to replace single-use items in festival catering. He and his team bring old plates, cups and cutlery to big events and wash them up in a mobile sink so that food stalls don’t need to bring single-use packaging.
Most projects to reduce waste are run by volunteers, says Dietsch, and as a result are limited by how much people can achieve in their free time. Their goal is to find a working business model to solve the problem. “We live in a capitalist society, and if we don’t want to change the system, then we need to act within it.”
Whether that works depends on the cost of littering and the willingness of people to change their habits. So far, there seems to be more interest in using goods once then sending them off to be recycled than there is in using them over and over again.
Aust, the president of Kiel city council, says many people are so focused on recycling they haven’t thought about reusing or reducing what they buy. “They simply don’t think about it any further.” A survey from the German Packaging Institute, an industry lobby group, found 76% of people thought recycling was the best way to deal with used packaging. Just half of the respondents said reuse.
In one sense, Germany’s obsession with sorting rubbish shows how millions of individual choices, taken daily in homes and workplaces across the country, can help protect the planet from harmful pollutants. But with plastic production booming and ships of plastic waste still docking in ports across Africa and Asia, Germany’s faith in recycling also shows the dangers of trying to clean up a mess instead of avoiding creating it in the first place.
“Congratulations to Germany, but it’s not enough,” says McQuibban. “We need to go beyond just recycling now.”