From Newsweek, 10/28/96. Copyright 1996, Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United Sattes. The laws prohibit any copying, redistribution or retransmission of this material without express written permission from Newsweek. |
Germany is suffering a garbage shortage. After decades of shrill predictions that their lavish consumer society would be buried under a pile of refuse, the Germans are now importing trash from as far away as Brazil. Expensive incinerators lie idle for lack of waste to burn. Ambitious landfill projects have been put on hold. German cities have passed laws requiring industries to have their scrap processed locally. National statistics demonstrate staggering declines in all categories of garbage. In the first three years of the 1990s, waste from all sources decreased by 16 percent - to 252 million tons. Household trash, which amounted to 43.3 million tons in 1990, is down to half that figure.
An ecologist's dream has turned into a minor economic nightmare. Since the early 1980s, incessant campaigns have urged Germans to reduce, divide and recycle their trash. At the same time, industries have developed elaborate schemes to convert Dreck into fertilizer and plastic, and to retrieve paper, glass and metal from the trash heap. Environment-friendly furnaces have sprung up to burn otherwise unusable rubbish and use the heat to generate electricity. The result: a boom in demand for both industrial and household waste, combined with a radical shrinkage of supply and a spiraling increase in the cost of garbage.
Other environmentally correct European nations face similar problems. But Germany's garbage gap appears to be the continent's worst. The "refuse crisis" became a national issue recently when the city of Dusseldorf ordered a local paper factory to stop shipping its waste to a Belgian cement company (which paid $162 a ton for it); instead, the firm was told to send it to the city waste-disposal plant (at a cost of $324 a ton). The paper plant obtained a temporary injunction stalling the city's high-handed action. And the Belgian cement company has petitioned the European Union to ban this and similar acts of "garbage protectionism" as obvious violations of the EU's single-market rules. (Ah... those European lawyers.)
However that case is settled, serious problems will remain. Germany's garbage phobia of the 1980s induced local governments to build lavish waste-disposal plants that are now costing taxpayers a fortune to keep open. A medium-size city like Augsburg, for example, spent $520 million on a state-of the-art furnace that is now a ruinous white elephant. Nationwide, taxes to finance and pay the fixed costs generated by such facilities have increased by 84 percent. Landfill companies, faced with the prospect of ever-dwindling trash supplies. Predict it will take up to 150 years to complete their current projects. There is "complete chaos on the garbage market," says Barbel Hohn, the environment minister for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The minister's warning may turn out to be a slight exaggeration - but trust the rule abiding German public has proved that it is indeed possible to have too little of a bad thing.