When it comes to recycling, Kiel has pulled ahead of the crowd, with its ban on single-use items, plans for leftover meals and innovative ideas for discarded human hair

The hair that drops in clumps on the floors of some salons in Kiel, a port city in northern Germany, is swept up to be turned into fabrics that filter oil from water. Parents who want to buy their children cloth nappies instead of disposable ones can apply for grants of up to €200 from the local authorities. At the city’s biggest festival last year, the organisers got rid of single-use cutlery and replaced it with a deposit system.

Germany is famed as a world leader in recycling – and Kiel, as I found out during a visit this summer, has some of the most weird and workable plans in the country to deal with its trash. It is the first German city to be declared “zero waste” by the environmental campaign group Zero Waste Europe. The certificate does not mean it has already stopped throwing things away – far from it – but rather that it has a concrete plan for how to do better.

“It’s one step in the right direction,” says Bettina Aust – a Green party politician who was elected president of Kiel city council in June – over a glass of juice made from apples that had been saved from landing in a supermarket bin. “You have to keep thinking further … You cannot stay still.”

Germany has a complicated relationship with waste. Despite its status as a world leader in recycling, Europe’s biggest economy is also one of its dirtiest. In 2021, the average German generated 646kg of waste, while the average EU citizen generated 530kg. Only in four EU countries – Austria, Luxembourg, Denmark and Belgium – did people throw away more.

Dino Klösen, a manager at Kiel’s waste management company ABK, says trends in the country’s consumption can be seen in its bins. Paper recycling bins that would have once been full of newspapers are now bursting with cardboard from delivery packages. “The weight of paper waste has dropped but the volume keeps rising from online shopping,” he says.

Awash with waste, cities like Kiel are exploring ways to throw away less and recycle more of what it does chuck. The city council has announced projects ranging from a ban on single-use items in public institutions, to installing more public drinking fountains, to teaching schoolchildren about waste. It is also encouraging people to make simple changes to their behaviour such as using solid bars of soap instead of buying plastic bottles of the stuff.

Other proposals are more systemic. The city is trialling a “pay as you throw” system where people are charged only for the rubbish they throw in the mixed waste bin. A report from the European Environment Agency last year found only about 30% of Germany is covered by such a scheme, even though areas that were covered saw an average drop in mixed waste of 25%.

“General waste is the most expensive form of rubbish there is,” says Klösen. “We are trying to motivate citizens to throw less waste in the bin by making them pay less for doing so.”

Even though waste-cutting efforts like Kiel’s are fairly novel in Germany, recycling is firmly rooted in the culture. In 2021, Germans collected more than two-thirds of their municipal solid waste to be repurposed – more than any other country in Europe. They burned most of the rest for energy, and dumped just 1% in landfills (the EU average is 16%).

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Aust, the president of Kiel city council, says many people are so focused on recycling they haven’t thought about reusing or reducing what they buy. “They simply don’t think about it any further.” A survey from the German Packaging Institute, an industry lobby group, found 76% of people thought recycling was the best way to deal with used packaging. Just half of the respondents said reuse.

In one sense, Germany’s obsession with sorting rubbish shows how millions of individual choices, taken daily in homes and workplaces across the country, can help protect the planet from harmful pollutants. But with plastic production booming and ships of plastic waste still docking in ports across Africa and Asia, Germany’s faith in recycling also shows the dangers of trying to clean up a mess instead of avoiding creating it in the first place.

“Congratulations to Germany, but it’s not enough,” says McQuibban. “We need to go beyond just recycling now.”