Paradoxically, local authorities do not even hide the fact that in 13 districts – from the Altstadt to the city’s eastern and southern boundaries – bins may simply be placed outside residents’ homes without prior notice, explanation, or the signing of any necessary approval documents.
Bins Will Appear Without Warning, Installation Timeline Still Unknown
According to representatives of Munich‘s waste management company (AWM), speaking at a meeting of the Bogenhausen district council, starting in mid-November the company Knettenbrech + Gurdulic Service GmbH of Kirchheim – the contractor responsible for the eastern part of the city – will begin placing yellow bins free of charge directly on residents’ private properties in the district. The contractor itself will determine the size of bin required.
Four bin volumes are available for installation:
- 120 liters;
- 240 liters;
- 770 liters;
- 1,100 liters.
Which streets will receive bins, and in what order, has not yet been specified. All that is known is that by December 31, all residents of the eastern part of the city are to be supplied with bins. As for the 12 districts in the west and north of Munich, AWM does not yet have installation details. Negotiations with RMG Rohstoffmanagement GmbH of Eltville am Rhein, the company responsible for that area, have not yet been concluded. AWM has warned, however, that if a resident needs a bin of a different size, they should contact the contractor directly rather than AWM.
Old Packaging Collection Points to Be Removed Ahead of Schedule
The yellow bin belongs to Germany’s dual waste disposal system (DSD), and this is precisely what complicates the transition to its use, especially during the changeover period. By December 31, all containers for packaging waste at existing recycling collection points are due to be dismantled.
Since it will be physically impossible to remove all the old bins in the final week of December, the company Wittmann, responsible for dismantling them, intends to start hauling away containers gradually starting now. Beyond the technical reasons, financial considerations play a role too: the company does not want to be left holding waste for which it will no longer be paid.
The company has apparently forgotten that we pay for the sorting, hauling, and disposal of waste all at once. They certainly won’t be left unpaid. Manipulating information for one’s own benefit, on the other hand, is already a crime – Ed.
At the same time, filling the new yellow bins (assuming they even manage to deliver them and drop them at the gate) is prohibited before January 1 – they are even planning to temporarily seal them (first they don’t factor in the cost of sealing and unsealing them, and then they complain that they’ll be left with unpaid-for waste? Where’s the logic in that? – Ed.).
The situation is further complicated by the fact that the switch to the new waste collection system will fall over the Christmas holidays, when the volume of packaging waste traditionally rises. “The transition will be chaos,” declared Petra Cockrell (Greens), the district council member responsible for the environment – forgetting that the project could have been designed professionally, so that bin installation happened gradually and without stress, rather than dumping bins in the middle of the street in the hope that residents would immediately notice and take them in. In our city everything is done at the last minute, and then those same Greens complain about the logistical problems that arise as a result. Problems that could have been avoided if decisions were made not under pressure from uneducated activists, but on the basis of conclusions from specialists in the field who would have calculated all the risks – rather than rushing to launch a new idea not for the sake of results, but for the sake of loud speeches, statements, and box-ticking…
Well, of course – who would have doubted it – Ed.
Residents Must Put Out the Bin Themselves
Unlike the bins for residual waste, paper, and bio-waste, residents will have to put the yellow bin out to the curb themselves – from 6:00 p.m. the evening before collection until 6:00 p.m. on the day of collection. Leaving the bin on the sidewalk for longer than that will be treated as a special use of public space and could formally result in a fine for an administrative violation. At the same time, AWM does not expect the city to actively enforce compliance with this rule.
On the other hand, it remains unclear why residents pay the city, and the city pays a private company, for hauling the bin to the garbage truck, returning the bin to its place, hauling away the waste, sorting it, processing it, and often even for the electricity generated from “waste processing” – yet residents are still required to sort their own waste, haul the bin out, and bring it back themselves, and to do so within strictly set time windows.
Number of Recycling Collection Points to Remain Unchanged
The total number of recycling collection points will remain the same after this reform. At the request of residents in some districts (often unmentioned is the fact that this was requested by two or three people at most), more glass containers can be installed at these points, AWM representatives said. The district council of Bogenhausen, for instance, doubts that the collection points will become any cleaner without plastic packaging.
It also remains an open question whether Remondis, the company responsible for glass collection, will have to keep these points clean on its own, since that too is included in what it is paid for. The yellow bin, meanwhile, will not become mandatory, even though Munich residents’ waste-sorting obligation applies regardless of it. Compliance checks for residual waste are not currently planned to be introduced.
To sum up everything described above, one can say with confidence that we, as in the last ten years, are living in some kind of surrealism – where officials appointed under party quotas fail to think reforms through, don’t know what project management is, fail to think through the risks, and shift responsibility onto private contractors. The private contractors, for their part, have grown used to earning excess profits from waste-sorting fees and other charges bundled into their payments – charges that should have been scrapped long ago.
And they have no wish to lose that income, so they shift the responsibility once again – this time onto the city’s residents. And the city’s residents are not represented on the city council by anyone capable of raising these problems and proposing solutions; we are represented by a handful of activists who, owing to their own lack of education, only make these problems worse with their ill-conceived demands.
