Why Is Germany Collecting Italy's Trash?

"There's less trash in summertime because so many people travel, which gives us extra capacity."

Fiedler said, "There is no quick fix for Italy's problem, which goes back some 20 years, because local governments have apparently been unable to get all sides to agree to a long-term plan allowing for the problem to escalate. Our city is lucky in that it has completely overcome the opposition toward building incinerators."

Fiedler explains that the city of Hamburg owns some of the best, high-quality incinerators that are relatively clean, using the latest technologies to filter out heavy metals, nitrous oxides, particles and sulphites.

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"One of our incinerators is able to produce heat for some 12,000 apartments in downtown Hamburg. The heat from burning trash is fed into the local heating grid," he explained.

"Another example is the huge Hamburg Harbor container terminal, where the entire surface consists of recycled incinerator slag used for road construction instead of having to dump it."

There are plenty of good examples of how to deal with garbage, mainly, how to reduce it not only in Germany but also in the Scandinavian countries, all of which have focused on reducing the amount of trash they send to landfills.

With garbage dumps filling up quickly, not only in Italy but everywhere in densely populated Europe, the European Union ruled that its member nations had to cut their waste dramatically, and the EU has strictly limited the reuse of garbage dumps because of health and environmental problems.

In Germany, the birth place of the environmental Green Party, waste management has successfully kept the use of landfills to a minimum, so much so that between 1990 and 2005 it has saved some 46 million tons of CO2 per year.

A spokesperson for the Berlin Environment Ministry explained the German system: "Ever since 2005, no biodegradable waste goes to landfills. Everything that is recyclable should be recycled, everything that is reusable should be reused, everything that does not fit into either of those categories should be dumped into the incinerator; in other words, Germany has managed to almost completely do away with disposing its trash at landfills."