The United States has come a long way in its recycling programs. Twenty years ago, a recycling bin might have been a hard-to-find item on a scavenger hunt, but today our country recycles about 28 percent of its waste, including 42 percent of paper, 40 percent of plastic bottles, 55 percent of aluminum cans, and 57 percent of steel. The U.S. might be up on the leader board, but many nations are implementing their own recycling programs that have or could outdo our efforts.
Germany
The Germans consider themselves some of the best recyclers — there is even a little civil competition around it. One poll reveals that 90 percent of German households willingly separate their garbage, which is necessary in order to follow the recycling rules: there are seven different color coded rubbish bins, for general waste, paper, compost, plastic/metal, amber glass, clear glass, and green glass. Failure to separate your waste accordingly will warrant ridicule from your friends and neighbors and sometimes even land you in jail.
France
There are only two recycling bins you need to worry about in Paris: white for glass, yellow for paper, plastic, and metal. France officials assume the public only bothers separating its waste to this extent, and estimate that for every ten items that end up in the recycling bins seven will have been correctly disposed of while three will be trash. The recyclables are then moved to the outskirts of Paris, where they are hand-separated into steel, plastics and cans, and paper. The divided items are then sent to various processing plants around the country. France is very proud to have the recycling technology in its country, and accepts some recyclables from the UK to be processed.
Spain
Madrid has the best glass recycling program on the market, due to Spanish law requiring companies to pay for recycling costs of the glass packaging. This supports a lively market for private companies to collect, sort, and reprocess glass. Outside the city, recyclables undergo an intense separation process and then are melted down to reform bottles and other glass items.
Switzerland
The Swiss are among the world’s top recyclers, correctly dispensing 76 percent of all recyclable material (compare that with 28 percent for the U.S.). This is enforced by charging a fee for household garbage, which is only supposed to be taken away if the bag has a payment sticker on it. Bags that are illegally thrown away without the disposal fee sticker are often rummaged through by police in order to track down the residence from which they came. Although rubbish backtracking is getting more difficult due to people reducing clues, some areas have implemented taxes, weighing machines, and chip-cards that need to be topped up with money. Making people pay for their trash helps keep landfills little, but the Swiss also promote recycling by making it cheaper than garbage or free of charge.
Denmark
One of Europe’s “greenest” countries, Denmark commits only 6 percent of waste to landfills, with 31 percent recycled and 62 percent incinerated. Denmark employs 10,000 authorities to go door to door and collect household waste to reuse. In places where not all types of wastes are collected there are help lines to find out where one can drop it off. Denmark does not have the infrastructure to process the recyclables and must export the waste to other countries, but its green improvements, including cracking down on manufacturers to create minimal waste, have given the country a new socially responsible pride.
Mexico
Our neighbor to the south has a reputation for its pollution problems, but Mexico’s latest recycling plan aims just to fix that. Appliance Recycling Centers of America has just announced it will be expanding into Mexico to work with a Mexican administrative corporation and 160 appliance retailers on a new refrigerator recycling program. The project is designed to recycle 400,000 old refrigerators for their metal, plastic, glass, and ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons by offering cash rebates and low-interest financing on new refrigerators.
Senegal
Recycling has become a way of life in Senegal. Senegalese are among the most innovative recyclers in the world, reusing almost everything they can. Plastic bags and old car tires are combined to make shoes; old soup cans are used for drinking cups; newspapers wrap food bought from vendors on the street; metal scraps are assembled into furniture. Some entrepreneurs have begun to collect metal in large quantities and send it back to factories in Europe.
United Kingdom
The UK has started to find itself searching for new places to dump trash on its small but crowded island. This has led to regulations on the amount of allowed trash per household, which has increased the need for recycling. But rising landfill charges are making it cheaper to send recyclables abroad, to China. China has been buying up more than one-third of the UK’s paper and plastic waste, which has put many British recycling plants out of business — not to mention received ample criticism about the unstudied environmental and social costs.
China
China has been gobbling up incredible amounts of recyclable waste from around the world, making it the world’s largest paper recycler. But much of what China buys is not separated or recycled, meaning that trash will keep building up in cities and harming the environment. Only about 20 percent of China’s waste is disposed of in accordance with international standards. Still, some cities are interested in improving their recycling infrastructure; Beijing recently built the world’s largest plastic recycling plant, has installed new recycling bins all over the city, and plans on increasing paper recovery from 10 percent to 80 percent by 2010.
