Germans Have a Burning Need for More Garbage
Lack of garbage forces power plants to import waste; ‘straw into gold’
MAGDEBURG, Germany—Each day, trucks roll into this city filled with the latest hot import from the streets of Manchester, England: garbage.
The destination is a power plant that makes a business of turning trash into electricity, or as it touts in a brochure, “spinning straw into gold.” The straw in this case is large, pillowy blobs of rubbish, neatly wrapped in plastic.
“Like a marshmallow,” beams Rolf Oesterhoff, manager of the MHKW Rothensee waste-to-energy plant.
A waste not, want not attitude mixed with a national zeal for recycling has led to an awkward problem for Germany: It isn’t producing enough of its own trash.
Over the past decade, heaps of garbage-burning power plants and composting facilities were built throughout Germany as the country shut off all its landfills to new household trash. But instead of growing, as many thought it would, household-waste production flattened, in part because sparing Germans edged their already-high recycling rate even higher.
Taken with the effects of a declining population and the global recession, plants in Germany were left short millions of tons of garbage a year, a quandary for companies that depend on a steady stream of rubbish to keep the lights on.
So the country turned to its trashier neighbors.
Now by boat and by truck, waste is piling in from England, Ireland, Italy and Switzerland, among others, to plants, where it gets burned and converted to electricity that keeps German households on the grid.
In Magdeburg, about 100 miles from Berlin, the trash is converted to electricity for one-third of the city, and heating for roughly 50,000 homes.
The imports are made possible by a European Union directive to gradually phase out landfills. That has led to higher taxes on landfill use in countries like Great Britain, making the trans-border shipping economically feasible.
Yet while the Netherlands and Sweden have made a business out of importing and processing their neighbors’ waste, rising rubbish imports are causing a backlash in Germany, where recycling and generally reducing waste is something of a national obsession.
The reverence of reduction dates back decades. In 1991, Germany passed a sweeping law that institutionalized recycling, one that helped inspire movements in other countries including the U.S., where about 34% of waste is now recycled.
Today, the recycling rate here counts among the highest in the world, by some measures, at roughly 65% of household trash. Within houses and apartments, kitchen waste bins can have four or more compartments for sorting various categories of recycling.
Further down the rubbish chain, communal containers in the courtyards or basements of apartment buildings span almost the full rainbow spectrum: In Berlin, there are different-colored bins for clear, brown and green glass, yellow bins for some plastic—but not all—brown bins for organic refuse, blue ones for paper and cardboard—but not all—and black or gray bins for everything else.
“We are a German generation that grew up with recycling,” said Stefan Korn, a 30-year-old Berlin resident. Mr. Korn is a founder of the boutique Upcycling Deluxe GmbH, one of a half dozen of so-called “upcycling” stores in Berlin. They take old clothing and other refuse and reconstitute it as chic handicrafts and apparel—at a less-than-trashy price.
Among its offerings: caps made from burlap coffee bean sacks ($44), lamps crafted from tea cups ($67 to $78) and car air bags reborn as laptop cases ($67).
Even at the Magdeburg power plant, recycling is a big deal. When the boilers are cleaned, metal from the coals is picked out with magnets, while the remaining ash is sold to an asphalt company, being reborn in the form of German roads.
So when it comes to importing trash, this culture of refuse reduction makes some Germans wary of cleaning up the rest of Europe’s mess.
First, there is the issue of odor.
When Irish garbage piled up, lying unmoved for weeks, near a pier in the midsize port city of Bremerhaven in northern Germany last year, the light smell turned to a wafting stench, and residents grew queasy.
“It was a terrible time…it smelled so awful,” said Karlheinz Michen, a member of the Bremerhaven city council. “There were so many flies in the area.”
Politicians intervened, and the trash moved on to its final destination of Hamburg.
Hamburg used to favor importing waste, and the city had a small contract with an English city to take care of its trash. But Hamburg city officials—feeling embarrassed about their relatively low recycling rate of about 40%—made a big push to improve it. That meant less trash, which meant shutting down one waste-to-energy plant, leaving less free capacity.
Closures like those in Hamburg are happening around the country for older and inefficient plants—welcome news for plants that can go on to charge higher prices to municipalities to dispose of their trash.
“We are definitely in a good mood,” said Peter Werz, spokesman for EEW Energy from Waste, which owns the Magdeburg plant.
The mood is a shift from three to four years ago, when the German price for waste was far lower—around $35 per ton compared with $55 to $80 per ton today, according to Tolvik Consulting.
Ultimately, such capacity reductions and rising waste prices may make it uneconomical for neighboring countries to ship their trash to Germany. But with declining trash production at home and other EU countries still phasing out landfills, the Magdeburg plant remains open, provided it has the space, to future imports of others’ waste.
“Not their waste,” corrects Mr. Werz. “Their energy.”
Write to Eliot Brown at eliot.brown@wsj.com