IT’S after 11am on a Monday morning and yellow-gloved, apron-clad workers are filing into the “picking lines” at Interzero, one of Berlin’s waste management companies.
They have the tedious job of picking through tonnes of waste – 140,000 tonnes annually – after the company’s advanced infrared system has taken a first pass, looking for items like tin foil and black waste materials.
They are the last line of defence, so to speak, in the German capital’s comprehensive chain of waste management that encompasses everything from the vast network of Interzero’s snaking sorting chutes and bottle-guzzling machines in grocery stores to the colourful array of bins outside the over two million households in the country’s biggest city.
“This is the control room for quality,” explains Interzero head of public affairs Henning Krumrey above the roar of conveyor belts chugging waste this way and that.
Operating around the clock daily (except for Saturday when it is closed for maintenance and cleaning), the company’s recycling and waste management facility at Hultschiner Damm some 18km outside central Berlin is – surprisingly – barely distinguishable from the other buildings in the leafy suburb.
Orange trucks carrying trash make a daily beeline for the yard, tipping their loads before heading out again. Nearby stand some remnants of the Berlin Wall, “waste”, you could say, from the Cold War.
“We have handpicking here for any [recyclable] material that any of our machines may have failed to detect and remove,” says Krumrey.
But that’s about to change. At a new Interzero facility in Marl, 440km from Berlin, it is not human workers that sort trash in the control room but robotic arms instead.
When the waste management industry began, Krumrey says there was only handpicking. But the amount of waste generated rose so quickly that sorting by hand soon became impractical. Necessity obviously pushed innovation, one reason surely for Germany’s prowess in managing its waste.
“It’s a very big sector ... this shows that there’s a lot of money in it,” points out Dr Andreas Jaron of Germany’s Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety Ministry.
He was speaking at a recent briefing of a delegation of Malaysian government officials visiting Germany to learn about its circular economy and waste management practices. The group included Environment Department deputy director-general (operations) Dr Norhazni Mat Sari, Malaysian Investment Development Authority Green Technology Division deputy director Afzanil Md Anuar, director of solid waste management at the Kota Kinabalu City Council Leong Tze Fui, and Seberang Perai city councillor Heng Yeh Shiuan.
Malaysia’s waste management industry reported some RM4.5bil in revenue in 2021. While we have managed to increase our recycling rate from 31.5% in 2021 to 33.17% last year, the government hopes to achieve a 40% rate by 2025. Adding urgency to the matter is the fact that we are running out of landfill space.
One of Germany’s advantages in this area is that it has had policies like the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) in place for decades to deal with waste like discarded packaging while Malaysia is only expected to finish drawing up a similar framework by the end of this year.
EPR places the responsibility of managing post-consumer waste, such as packaging, on manufacturers.
Wasted opportunity
Another reason perhaps for its waste management expertise is that Germany takes the matter very seriously indeed, having in effect a slew of some 30 legislations from the European Union as well as the German Federal Government, including a Circular Economy Act passed as far back as 2012.
Strong education about the environment also helps the recycling rate, with each household having as many as four to five bins, depending on the municipality, to sort waste.
“Usually we have a black bin for residual waste, a brown one for organic waste, a blue one for paper, a yellow one for packaging, and in some houses, I have seen orange ones for ewaste,” says Jaron.
There are also collection points for batteries, glass and textiles, and specific yards for hazardous waste; in Jaron’s village of 4,000 residents, such yards send out lorries once every three weeks too.
Glass recycling is even divided by colours, specifically, green, brown and white.
This finicky separation – something of a national obsession – has an important purpose.
“I have to say in Germany, we have 83 million experts,” remarks Jaron wryly, joking that Germans “love to spend their leisure time on this”.
“What’s important is that you must keep the streams separate or else recycling is not possible, or there is lower recycling.
“For example, if you mix biowaste with packaging, you can do nothing with it. Or if you mix glass with metals, you can do nothing with it because no recycler will take your waste. Or if you have paper with biowaste, you cannot recycle the biowaste or the paper,” Jaron explains.
“So it’s always necessary to keep things separate, and then you can reach your recycling rates.”
It is this attention to detail that is behind Germany’s efficient waste collection system and, hence, its robust recycling rate.
According to Jaron, this also allows Germany to treat waste as a secondary resource that can be sold.
“For instance, in Germany, it’s very common that used textiles are collected separately by the commercial sector and sorted. [Anything] still wearable and marketable can be put on the market,” he says.
Such an attitude perhaps partly explains why German waste has reportedly turned up in Malaysia.
In 2018, China banned plastic waste imports, which brought tonnes of it to our shores instead, as well as other parts of South-East Asia. For a while – until the Environment Department began turning away shipments – Malaysia had to contend with the international media showing pictures of heaps of plastic wrapping and foil spilling out of containers in rusty junkyards. And that included, according to a report by Greenpeace, waste from Germany.
“Plastic is a raw material so why shouldn’t we export it as any raw material, like oil, maybe? The non-governmental groups criticised such a move but it’s worth hundreds of million euros,” says Interzero’s Krumrey.
“When everyone pays so much for this material, why should we throw it away? It is a business – but it must be regulated and controlled and done properly,” he adds.
Germany’s Federal Statistical Office reported that last year the country exported 745,100 tonnes of plastic waste, making it the largest exporter of the material in Europe.
Waste not, want not
Jaron shares this bit of wisdom: When waste is generated, the first thing one should do is ask if it is still reusable in order to keep resources within the economy.
“Not a linear economy but a circular economy,” he says.
“And if you want to raise money from recycling, then you need separate collection schemes, which need bins, the establishment of bins for each household,” he stresses.
Similarly, for industries, whatever material they have as residue after production is also separated at source; this way, they can either earn money from selling the recycled material or paying lower waste management fees, says Jaron.
This then brings up financing, a key element in making waste management practices sustainable.
“Where is the money coming from – it’s always the key question in developing the modern circular economy,” says Jaron, who was a member of the Bureau of the Basel Convention of the United Nations Environment Programme for 10 years.
He was also the co-chair of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Working Group on Waste Prevention and Recycling from 2008 to 2010.
“You can find the technology but it’s a question of how you collect waste in a proper way or how you finance investment in the sector, and in the end, how you pay the people working in the sector.”
In principle, there are four sources of financing, says Jaron.
There are waste management fees paid by those who generate the waste, money raised from selling recyclables, EPR policy fees, and state subsidies from general taxes – and he doesn’t recommend the last.
“I can tell you from my own experience that subsidies never work,” he says, adding that politicians usually prefer to spend taxes on water supply or security issues.
“As long as there’s a hole in the ground somewhere, it’s used [by politicians] for waste management,” he quips.
Whereas residual waste in most countries heads for landfills, Jaron says in Germany, this could still be used as secondary sources of energy. (Residual waste is nonhazardous industrial waste.)
“Due to the high calorific value of German residual waste, at 10,000 kilojoules to 12,000 kilojoules per kg, you can generate heat and electricity from it,” he says.
“The landfilling of waste is the worst thing you can do. It causes environmental problems, contaminated leachate, emits methane, and also involves the use of landscape,” Jaron says.
Wasting away
Essen is a prosperous town of some 600,000 people in the north Rhine-Westphalia region, about four hours away by train from Berlin. We’re in a yard, watching residents driving in with car boots loaded with waste.
Patiently, they wait their turn to offload trash, anything from leaves from the garden, mildewed pillows and outdated television sets to tubes of fluorescent lighting and used batteries.
It is in places like Essen that the various regulations and legislations Germany uses to govern waste are put into practice.
“The implementation of the waste laws,” explains Jaron, “is with the lander [federal state]. It’s not the Federal Government which is implementing the legislation in the states.”
(The Federal Republic of Germany consists of 16 lander.)
Essen Waste Disposal Companies operations head Sandra Jungmaier says people who generate more waste than their household bins can accommodate must pay for the extra material they bring to the recycling yard.
“The extra fees will go into funding services for the city,” she says.
Built in the 1990s, the recycling yard is one of two big centres the city has, and measures over 14,000sq m with a 50,000 tonne storage capacity. It sees some 160,000 customers every year.
The city of Essen, which partly owns the two centres as well as six other smaller yards, is also in the midst of planning a new and more modern recycling hub that it hopes to open next year.
In Essen, all owners of buildings registered with the council are only obliged to pay for a bin for residual waste – which the city collects some 680 tonnes of – but can also book other bins for paper and garden waste.
It was calculated that the separate collection and recycling of paper and garden waste generated 180,000 MWh (megawatt hours) for Essen in 2020. This corresponds to the annual electricity and heating requirements of 10,150 households and the annual CO2 footprint of 1,030 German citizens.
To prevent waste from ending up in the wrong place – like Malaysia – Jungmaier says the recycling centres now keep documentation on the origin of their waste and the subsequent destination when it is picked up for recycling.
And unlike many recycling centres in Malaysia that don’t accept CDs or glass, or that only take one type of waste, precious little is turned away from Essen’s yards; only medicine and diapers, for instance, are incinerated.
However, much like the local councils in Malaysia, the city’s authorities are also struggling with the challenges of illegal dumping despite the many regulations and fines in place.
“We have an app through which people can give us information where there is rubbish, and they can take a photo to send to us.”
The council needs about three days to clear such dumps, says Jungmaier, adding that progress can be monitored on the app. “It’s a big problem for Essen. In the city, we have about 20,000 cases a year.”
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How Germany treats its waste
Tractors moving waste from the reception hall to the sorting section.
The lovely exterior of a facility that deals with ugly waste: the Interzero waste management centre some 18km out of central Berlin.
Interzero's distinctive orange trucks trundling into the facility with waste and heading out to collect even more.
A staff member at a grocery store demonstrating the recycling machine for glass bottles.
Customers who return bottles receive a slip with credit which they can later redeem at the store.
One of the huge dumpsters at the centre in Essen.
A resident's car laden with items for recycling at the centre in Essen.
The array of bins for different types of waste outside a typical home in Essen.
Members of the Malaysian delegation with Interzero's Krumrey (third from left) at one of the remnants of the Berlin Wall near the facility in Berlin.
