Germany Packaging Machinery Market Research Report - PMMI

packaging and other packaging material for the industrial and commercial sector make up the other half
of packaging consumption.
According to a study by the GVM on the development of packaging consumption in Germany in the
1990s, packaging consumption was reduced from a total of 15.6 million tons in 1991 to 13.8 million
tons in 1997. Regarding the consumer packaging segment, consumption decreased in the same period
from 7.6 million tons to 6.8 million tons. The bulk of packaging material by weight is glass and paper,
whereas the most widely used packaging material—plastic—ranks third because of its light weight.
The cause of this positive development was the introduction of the German Packaging Ordinance in
1991. The Ordinance passed on the responsibility to manufacturers and distributors of packaging to
take back and recycle their used packaging. The relevant industries were made responsible,
independently from municipal waste disposal systems, for collecting and recycling their used
packaging materials at their own expense. Because of the additional costs, industry was motivated to
reduce packaging and to create cost-effective recycling of material.
While in the industrial and commercial sector, registration and recycling systems for the bigger and
less contaminated transport packaging material already existed to a great extent or could be installed at
low cost, for consumer packaging materials a new organization had to be created. The DSD (Duales
System Deutschland AG [www.gruener-punkt.de]) was founded by manufacturers and suppliers in
1993 to manage the collection and recycling of packaging material. By 1998 it had recycled 29.7
million tons of consumer packaging materials.
In August 1998 the German Packaging Ordinance was amended in the light of experience and also to
bring it into line with new EU packaging guidelines. Under this law, manufacturers and suppliers have
to document each year whether they have fulfilled or overfulfilled their obligations. The largest
increases in recycled goods have been achieved with plastic and aluminum packaging material.
The results indicate that, with the active cooperation of the consumer, recycling of consumer packaging
materials in Germany has reached a high level. The material recovered has made an important
contribution in terms of saving raw material and energy-conscious recycling management. The GVM
calculated a recycling quota for the entire packaging sector—consumer and transport packaging—of
about 80% in 1997 (11.1 million tons of recycled packaging material).