7 ms·

> It was amazing what a cultural force this habit seems to have for many Germans. I'm not asking maliciously, but I wonder how Germans reconcile their seemingl

> It was amazing what a cultural force this habit seems to have for many Germans. I'm not asking maliciously, but I wonder how Germans reconcile their seemingly environmental awareness with their high CO2 emissions and big cars culture.

mc32 6y ago
They also had a recycling scandal when it was exposed all the tidy sorting at home hit all dumped at the refuse center and either dumped or shipped off but mostly not recycled.
- quercusa 6y ago
  I got suspicious when Portland moved from sorted recycling (four bins, I think) to 'combined recycling'. How could it make economic sense to then sort it back out?
  - gumby 6y ago
    The theory given is that it increases recycling by reducing the cognitive load. Whether that is true or not is left as an exercise for the reader.
    - syntheticnature 6y ago
      The additional theory I've heard is that people stink at properly sorting recycling... ...though then you get the other issue, "aspirational recycling", where things that aren't even claimed to be recyclable end up in the bins.
    - wahern 6y ago
      Supposedly it could be cost effective when China was paying for plastic. Not that the additional recycling necessarily decreased overall costs, just that single-binning could still be profitable at the collection rates people were used to, and people obviously preferred it. Now that China won't take plastic even if you pay them, I'm sure the financials look different.
- cameldrv 6y ago
  I remember hearing a (possibly apocryphal) story about how it was discovered in one town that all of the recycling was getting incinerated. It was then asked why they needed to sort everything, and the answer was that it was useful to help control the temperature of the incinerator. If the flame was too cool, throw in more plastic. Too hot, more wet compostable material.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    When I was in college I did some report on our local recycling program. I interviewed a manager and learned that our recyclables were actually mixed and trucked to a town several hours away because we didn't have the volume to sell the sorted quantities. I asked why we had to sort at home then and he said "well if we ever can sell individually we want people to be used to it." I never sorted my recyclables again. Where I live now it isn't even possible, all recyclables go in one bin.
schoen 6y ago
The conflict I heard about was all the coal mining (a huge industry in Germany), although in theory they're going to stop burning coal by around the end of the Unix epoch. (I don't know if that also means that they're going to stop extracting it to sell to other countries' energy markets.) I think German CO₂ emissions are quite low in comparison to German standards of living (like per joule of electricity, per Euro of GDP, per kcal of food eaten) but that doesn't necessarily mean they're low in an absolute sense, because German standards of living are also very high.
chiph 6y ago
Every little bit helps. There is a concern about auto emissions, but car registration tax[0] is proportional to displacement so there is an incentive to buy smaller engines. And of course, fuel is heavily taxed in Europe so there's a big incentive away from larger engines. If you compare something like a BMW 7-Series sold in the US to one sold in Germany, the German model will usually be sold with a smaller engine that costs less to register and much less to operate. [0] https://kfz-steuer.wiki/en/car-tax-germany/ https://kfz-steuer.wiki/en/car-tax-germany/
an_opabinia 6y ago
Consumerism is irreconcilable with environmentalism, capitalism is probably irreconcilable with environmentalism. What is there to discuss? Alternatives to capitalism? Capitalism in the absence of consumerism? Is that possible in the absence of retail? Stores? Low prices?
cameldrv 6y ago
Speaking as someone who cares about the environment, I think that environmentalism in Germany has parallels to religious practice. I don't think that it's a coincidence that Germany is extremely areligious, and that sorting trash is taken to such an extreme. Sorting trash is a ritual, it is slightly sacrificial in time (especially returning bottles to the store), and it can be seen as a penance for the sin of purchasing single use products. I think we will continue to see more things like this pop up as people search for meaning in their lives, and want things that they can do daily to affirm that meaning.
- labster 6y ago
  I suppose the truly religious environmentalists can buy indulgences in the form of carbon credits. Airlines offer them so the people guilty about travel can pay the owner of a forest to do nothing. Not perfect because you still make carbon, but at least you don’t have to pilgrimage in a sailboat like Greta Thunberg.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    If carbon credits are implemented without massive fraud, I don't think it's fair to call them indulgences. If enough people bought carbon credits under a working system it would be a flood of money toward restricting carbon release and recapturing carbon.
    - corty 6y ago
      Carbon credits most probably are a massive fraud. First it is unclear what measures each credit you buy will take to capture/reduce/limit carbon. Then, those credits are too cheap to have any plausible benefit. Even staunch fans usually introduce them with "well, its something, its a start". I think carbon credits are a scam in the same stage recycling was 20 or 30 years ago.
    - labster 6y ago
      Carbon credits are issued to companies in the industry based on a certain amount they are allowed to pollute. This is the cap, the credits are the trade, in "cap-and-trade". However, all that pollution still gets polluted in the end, the only thing that changes is who does it, and who pays. Other players can enter the market and claim to absorb carbon, but very often these people are just monetizing ecosystem services that were already happening before they showed up. If the cost of the credit was of the same value as removing the pollution, sure. This doesn't happen, though. Like sin, the credit doesn't undo the pollution, it just forgives it. The world still gets more polluted either way.
ced 6y ago
Compared to other developed countries they are not the worst. Australia: 16.8 tons/capita/year Canada/US: 16.1 Germany: 9.1 China: 8.0 France: 5.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Why does France do so much better?
  - corty 6y ago
    Nuclear power plants, the only large-scale green energy source in existence.
    - natmaka 6y ago
      Nope. This is only true for gridpower "production", which is only a small part of the total energy production (about 25%), and there are other (non energy-related) sources CO2 emissions. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24374697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24374697
  - hailwren 6y ago
    Probably poverty and industry. Germany has more industry and has historically had a stronger economy. So, that probably leads to lifestyles that promote more energy use.
- yodsanklai 6y ago
  https://www.statista.com/chart/19937/europes-biggest-greenhouse-gas-emitters/ https://www.statista.com/chart/19937/europes-biggest-greenho... Compared to other European countries, they are significantly worst.
  - ced 6y ago
    https://vividmaps.com/carbon-dioxide-emissions-european-countries/ https://vividmaps.com/carbon-dioxide-emissions-european-coun... Maybe it's just quibbling, but anyway, per-capita Germany is among the worst but not the worst.
throwaway316943 6y ago
Germans take the conservative approach to nature in the literal sense. It’s every bit as part of their culture as cars and beer, perhaps more so. Hunting is an ancient German tradition as well and there is no hunt without woods to hunt in.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  HALALI! https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halali_(Jagd) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halali_(Jagd)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
blablabla123 6y ago
German here, I don't think separating trash is necessarily considered an act to help the environment. It's somehow part of the culture and brings additional benefits: easier storage (e.g. you can place an open paper bin in the living room and it won't rot) and recycling containers that are picked up by the city are cheaper than the mixed waste containers. People with gardens can even save more money by maintaining their own organic waste there. Also in many cities there is no separate container for consumer packaging - instead one can put it in a yellow plastic bag that is put on the street for pick-up. Same for recycling of bottles, you cannot really opt-out, it's more expensive to not recycle them. Of course there are also a lot of people that do all this for the environment though.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Sure you can, buy tetra-paks instead. Another thing one could do is to separate the packaging from the product in the store after the cashier. They ALL have the bins there, but almost nobody does that. Neither do I, because the packaging actually helps the product survive the short trip in my backpack unharmed :-) Besides that, didn't you notice how the packaging got more and more flimsy in the last years? Take 500ml Yoghurt for example: very thin white plastic, with recycled carton around it for stability, pre-perforated for easy ripping it off. Even the clear plastic lid on top for protection of the(thin) aluminium foil is missing, intentionally. Which I dislike, because of possible mess when transported in the backpack. Same goes for single use plastic bottles. You can easily crunch them, and the thin wraparound label comes of.
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Hm. Speaking as a German, which never had a drivers license, does everything by bicycle or on food as possible, I think "Die Freude am Fahrvergnügen" is indoctrination by decades long advertisment on all channels. We could have built the so called 3-litre-car(100km per 3 liters of gas) since the 80ies. But almost nobody wants to buy that. Apart from that, looking at real traffic, you see lots of compact and economical cars too. For some the car is the holy cow, and it is heresy to speak against it. For some others they are the plague. It depends, k?

mc32 6y ago

They also had a recycling scandal when it was exposed all the tidy sorting at home hit all dumped at the refuse center and either dumped or shipped off but mostly not recycled.

quercusa 6y ago
I got suspicious when Portland moved from sorted recycling (four bins, I think) to 'combined recycling'. How could it make economic sense to then sort it back out?
- gumby 6y ago
  The theory given is that it increases recycling by reducing the cognitive load. Whether that is true or not is left as an exercise for the reader.
  - syntheticnature 6y ago
    The additional theory I've heard is that people stink at properly sorting recycling... ...though then you get the other issue, "aspirational recycling", where things that aren't even claimed to be recyclable end up in the bins.
  - wahern 6y ago
    Supposedly it could be cost effective when China was paying for plastic. Not that the additional recycling necessarily decreased overall costs, just that single-binning could still be profitable at the collection rates people were used to, and people obviously preferred it. Now that China won't take plastic even if you pay them, I'm sure the financials look different.
cameldrv 6y ago
I remember hearing a (possibly apocryphal) story about how it was discovered in one town that all of the recycling was getting incinerated. It was then asked why they needed to sort everything, and the answer was that it was useful to help control the temperature of the incinerator. If the flame was too cool, throw in more plastic. Too hot, more wet compostable material.
- mulmen 6y ago
  When I was in college I did some report on our local recycling program. I interviewed a manager and learned that our recyclables were actually mixed and trucked to a town several hours away because we didn't have the volume to sell the sorted quantities. I asked why we had to sort at home then and he said "well if we ever can sell individually we want people to be used to it." I never sorted my recyclables again. Where I live now it isn't even possible, all recyclables go in one bin.

schoen 6y ago

The conflict I heard about was all the coal mining (a huge industry in Germany), although in theory they're going to stop burning coal by around the end of the Unix epoch. (I don't know if that also means that they're going to stop extracting it to sell to other countries' energy markets.) I think German CO₂ emissions are quite low in comparison to German standards of living (like per joule of electricity, per Euro of GDP, per kcal of food eaten) but that doesn't necessarily mean they're low in an absolute sense, because German standards of living are also very high.

chiph 6y ago

Every little bit helps. There is a concern about auto emissions, but car registration tax[0] is proportional to displacement so there is an incentive to buy smaller engines. And of course, fuel is heavily taxed in Europe so there's a big incentive away from larger engines. If you compare something like a BMW 7-Series sold in the US to one sold in Germany, the German model will usually be sold with a smaller engine that costs less to register and much less to operate. [0] https://kfz-steuer.wiki/en/car-tax-germany/ https://kfz-steuer.wiki/en/car-tax-germany/

an_opabinia 6y ago

Consumerism is irreconcilable with environmentalism, capitalism is probably irreconcilable with environmentalism. What is there to discuss? Alternatives to capitalism? Capitalism in the absence of consumerism? Is that possible in the absence of retail? Stores? Low prices?

cameldrv 6y ago

Speaking as someone who cares about the environment, I think that environmentalism in Germany has parallels to religious practice. I don't think that it's a coincidence that Germany is extremely areligious, and that sorting trash is taken to such an extreme. Sorting trash is a ritual, it is slightly sacrificial in time (especially returning bottles to the store), and it can be seen as a penance for the sin of purchasing single use products. I think we will continue to see more things like this pop up as people search for meaning in their lives, and want things that they can do daily to affirm that meaning.

labster 6y ago
I suppose the truly religious environmentalists can buy indulgences in the form of carbon credits. Airlines offer them so the people guilty about travel can pay the owner of a forest to do nothing. Not perfect because you still make carbon, but at least you don’t have to pilgrimage in a sailboat like Greta Thunberg.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  If carbon credits are implemented without massive fraud, I don't think it's fair to call them indulgences. If enough people bought carbon credits under a working system it would be a flood of money toward restricting carbon release and recapturing carbon.
  - corty 6y ago
    Carbon credits most probably are a massive fraud. First it is unclear what measures each credit you buy will take to capture/reduce/limit carbon. Then, those credits are too cheap to have any plausible benefit. Even staunch fans usually introduce them with "well, its something, its a start". I think carbon credits are a scam in the same stage recycling was 20 or 30 years ago.
  - labster 6y ago
    Carbon credits are issued to companies in the industry based on a certain amount they are allowed to pollute. This is the cap, the credits are the trade, in "cap-and-trade". However, all that pollution still gets polluted in the end, the only thing that changes is who does it, and who pays. Other players can enter the market and claim to absorb carbon, but very often these people are just monetizing ecosystem services that were already happening before they showed up. If the cost of the credit was of the same value as removing the pollution, sure. This doesn't happen, though. Like sin, the credit doesn't undo the pollution, it just forgives it. The world still gets more polluted either way.

ced 6y ago

Compared to other developed countries they are not the worst. Australia: 16.8 tons/capita/year Canada/US: 16.1 Germany: 9.1 China: 8.0 France: 5.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

saagarjha 6y ago
Why does France do so much better?
- corty 6y ago
  Nuclear power plants, the only large-scale green energy source in existence.
  - natmaka 6y ago
    Nope. This is only true for gridpower "production", which is only a small part of the total energy production (about 25%), and there are other (non energy-related) sources CO2 emissions. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24374697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24374697
- hailwren 6y ago
  Probably poverty and industry. Germany has more industry and has historically had a stronger economy. So, that probably leads to lifestyles that promote more energy use.
yodsanklai 6y ago
https://www.statista.com/chart/19937/europes-biggest-greenhouse-gas-emitters/ https://www.statista.com/chart/19937/europes-biggest-greenho... Compared to other European countries, they are significantly worst.
- ced 6y ago
  https://vividmaps.com/carbon-dioxide-emissions-european-countries/ https://vividmaps.com/carbon-dioxide-emissions-european-coun... Maybe it's just quibbling, but anyway, per-capita Germany is among the worst but not the worst.

throwaway316943 6y ago

Germans take the conservative approach to nature in the literal sense. It’s every bit as part of their culture as cars and beer, perhaps more so. Hunting is an ancient German tradition as well and there is no hunt without woods to hunt in.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
HALALI! https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halali_(Jagd) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halali_(Jagd)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

blablabla123 6y ago

German here, I don't think separating trash is necessarily considered an act to help the environment. It's somehow part of the culture and brings additional benefits: easier storage (e.g. you can place an open paper bin in the living room and it won't rot) and recycling containers that are picked up by the city are cheaper than the mixed waste containers. People with gardens can even save more money by maintaining their own organic waste there. Also in many cities there is no separate container for consumer packaging - instead one can put it in a yellow plastic bag that is put on the street for pick-up. Same for recycling of bottles, you cannot really opt-out, it's more expensive to not recycle them. Of course there are also a lot of people that do all this for the environment though.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Sure you can, buy tetra-paks instead. Another thing one could do is to separate the packaging from the product in the store after the cashier. They ALL have the bins there, but almost nobody does that. Neither do I, because the packaging actually helps the product survive the short trip in my backpack unharmed :-) Besides that, didn't you notice how the packaging got more and more flimsy in the last years? Take 500ml Yoghurt for example: very thin white plastic, with recycled carton around it for stability, pre-perforated for easy ripping it off. Even the clear plastic lid on top for protection of the(thin) aluminium foil is missing, intentionally. Which I dislike, because of possible mess when transported in the backpack. Same goes for single use plastic bottles. You can easily crunch them, and the thin wraparound label comes of.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

Hm. Speaking as a German, which never had a drivers license, does everything by bicycle or on food as possible, I think "Die Freude am Fahrvergnügen" is indoctrination by decades long advertisment on all channels. We could have built the so called 3-litre-car(100km per 3 liters of gas) since the 80ies. But almost nobody wants to buy that. Apart from that, looking at real traffic, you see lots of compact and economical cars too. For some the car is the holy cow, and it is heresy to speak against it. For some others they are the plague. It depends, k?