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Germany is drowning in waste
"Eco-friendly" Germany is drowning in its own rubbish. Each year, the country consumes more than 220 kilos of packaging per capita – more than any other country in the European Union. And they manage to do so under the watchful eye of the Green Party.
Published: July 27, 2018, 9:32 am
Published on Thursday by the Federal Environment Agency (UBA), the latest figures are much higher than the European average of 167.3 kilos per capita. According to the UBA, Germany accumulated 18.6 million tonnes of packaging waste in 2016, an increase of 0.05 percent from the previous year.
“We produce far too much packaging waste – an unfortunate first place in Europe,” says UBA President, Maria Krautzberger. “Most of all we have to reduce waste, possibly even in the production phase by avoiding unnecessary packaging.”
Private consumers generate almost half of the waste, with single-use fast-food containers and drinking from disposable plastic cups. Only 49.7 percent of plastic and 26 percent of wood was recycled.
The use of plastic use has slightly decreased from 2015-16, but Krautzberger cautioned against optimism as glass and aluminum packaging have increased, both of which are energy-intensive to manufacture.
A new packaging law will impose higher quotas on packaging recycling in 2019.
The UBA warned against packages containing magnets which contains neodymium. A rare earth, neodymium, releases radioactive thorium and uranium. Some 4.5 tonnes of neodymium magnets were found in packaging waste last year, and so far, there have been no attempts to recover neodymium from recycled packaging.
The trash dilemma the country is facing, highlights the identity crisis faced by the Greens, who started out as an environmental protest movement. Before the elections last year, they were part of the government in 10 of Germany’s 16 federal states, and had successfully shifted the establishment’s emotional attitudes on immigration.
Today, the Greens are struggling, more than any other party in Germany, to focus on their core idea since they decided instead to embrace the “refugees” flooding the country. Their campaign themes — such as migration, inequality and same-sex civil partnerships — do not play to their strengths, while on fundamental green issues such as trash, they have been mum.
But former party chief Simone Peter is adamant. She told the Financial Times: “We don’t have to reinvent ourselves. We have to concentrate on our core themes. It is the other parties that need to reflect the huge challenges like global warming, migration and rising inequality.”
The party constantly complains that Germany’s asylum rules are not generous enough, and they want to roll back the restrictions put in place in response to the rise of the AfD after the refugee crisis of 2015. The Greens have also called for an immigration law that would make it easier for migrants to move to the country, promoting open borders and “solidarity” with poor countries.
“None of the traditional Green topics is at the center of public attention anymore,” Hubert Kleinert, one of the first Green members in the German parliament between 1983 and 1986 and now a professor of social science at the University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden, told Politico.
More than a third of all Germans believe the party has “no solutions for important topics like refugee policy or fighting terror,” according to a YouGov survey from last year.
Kleinert noted: “They [the Greens] want to govern but they don’t want to deal with what comes with that responsibility. They want to remain morally clean, but at the same time, they want power.”
It abandoned strict pacifism much earlier, in 1999, when Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer backed Germany’s participation in the NATO bombing of Kosovo.
Last year, following a crushing defeat in a state election, top candidate Katrin Göring-Eckardt responded that “apparently … the topics [we’re campaigning on] are not being perceived as the ‘hot shit’ of the republic”.
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