International Review of Waste Management Policy - Department of ...

The study by Prognos mentions that the DSD system would imply a financial burden
for the economy and the consumers relative to an alternative system based on
incineration and landfilling. 272
The Öko-Institut concluded that the criticism levelled against the DSD on financial
grounds did not take into account the significant external benefits associated with the
system relative to alternative forms of waste treatment.
14.7 Effects on Technical Change / Innovation
In the first years of the implementation of DSD, the lack of recycling capacity in
Germany led to abuses such as illegal export of DSD-Waste to Asia. Due to the legal
take-back and recycling duties as well as the duty to pay for the use of Green Dot
system, money was raised to be spent on the development of recycling technologies
and recycling capacities. Due to the generally low value of post-consumer packaging
plastics, without the DSD funding system, the above mentioned investments would
have not taken place.
Technical changes and innovation raised by the introduction of a Dual System have
taken place on all levels of the system. In the first half of the 90’s the packaging
manufacturers reduced the specific weight of packaging and removed superfluous
packaging. Throughout the nineties the sorting-technology for light weight packaging
(LWP) improved significantly: from mainly manual sorting to semi-automatic sorting. In
a next step, fully automatic sorting technologies with integrated refinement were
introduced. Another innovation was NIR (near infrared) sorters, facilitating an
increase in homogeneous plastic fractions. Concerning the reprocessing of recycled
material, the recycling of used PET-bottles to new PET-bottles was possible due to the
development of the “bottle-to-bottle”-technology.
The Prognos AG published a report in the year 2002 that suggested the DSD had
created 17,000 jobs in total (this was a net figure - job cuts in some specific sectors
of the economy were factored in). 273 Furthermore the study underlined the important
contribution of the DSD in promoting technical innovations and investments.
14.8 Social and Distributional Consequences
In the first years of the DSD, arguments against the system were very often of a social
nature. It was argued that people would not accept that they should separate their
household waste, or that the separation of waste was not acceptable to those who
would have to do this. Many politicians have claimed that the end of the DSD system
and the “yellow bag” was imminent, stretching back to 1990. Nevertheless the
majority of the population has learned to deal with the “yellow bag” and accepted the
Green Dot system.
272 See Fn. 269.
273 Prognos AG (2002) Nachhaltigkeitsbewertung und Perspektiven des Dualen Systems in
Deutschland, Report for DSD, 2002.
258
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