ExclusiveChina’s waste ban has rocked the recycling world and revealed Hong Kong’s dire record. What next for the city’s rising mountains of trash?
Experts say the city desperately needs to recover, recycle and reduce the use of plastic as the export market for waste product dries up. But others believe the solution must go beyond recycling, and that science will save us
Rubbish is all about economics in Berlin.
“We can’t have too much,” said Michael Paulus, an executive at BSR, the city’s government-owned waste collection firm. “But we can’t have too little either.”
Such a statement may sound counter-intuitive to a place like Hong Kong – where governments past and present have been haplessly trying to cut waste production at source to ease pressure on the city’s overflowing tips. But in Germany’s capital, it is a modus operandi.
Almost none of Berlin’s waste goes to landfills. With mandatory waste sorting policies, the bulk is either recycled or incinerated into steam or biogas for electricity and heating.
The organic waste Berliners dump in bins – the level of which has been flat, if not falling – is enough to power about 12 per cent of city households and more than 6 per cent of those connected to district heating. Operations are funded by a well-oiled volume-based waste charging system in place since the 1950s.
“It’s taken us about 40 years to get to where we are today,” Paulus said.
But this is just part of the story. Germany, up until around last year, was exporting about 70 per cent of its plastic waste to China. Of the 56 million tonnes of paper the European Union disposed of in 2016, eight million was shipped east.