617 kilos: that’s the average amount of waste generated by every German every year. That means that at my age, I have produced more than 38 tonnes of waste in my lifetime – perhaps slightly less, assuming that we lived in a less wasteful society in the past. As children, we learned what could be thrown away and what was to be used for a long time. Not that I am harking back to the “good old days”: on the contrary, we can all remember the problems that affected waste disposal well into the 1980s. In those days, landfill was the default option for the disposal of all types of waste, with no thought given to recycling or reducing the volume of waste. And as mountains of hazardous waste built up at poorly secured landfill sites, toxins leached into groundwater and methane from landfill gas escaped into the atmosphere.
So what do we need from a sustainable circular economy today?…
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