German household waste per capita down in 2018

Source: Xinhua | 2019-12-30

The volume of household waste in Germany per capita fell by 1.5 percent from 462 to 455 kilograms in 2018, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) announced on Friday.

According to Destatis, the main reason for the decrease was the strong decline in biowaste volumes caused by the extreme drought in 2018. On average, Germans produced 120 kilograms of biowaste, 5 kilograms less than in 2017.

In total, 37.8 million tons of waste including residual household waste, biowaste, recyclables and bulky waste were collected from households in Germany, down by 0.5 million tons compared to last year, Destatis noted.

In 2018, the amount of recyclable materials including paper, mixed packaging and glass taken by waste collection fell by 0.1 million tons to 12.1 million tons compared to the previous year and amounted to 146 kilograms of recyclables per capita, according to Destatis.

Germany's Ministry for the Environment (BMU) recently presented a draft bill to ban disposable plastic bags with a thickness of less than 50 micrometers.

Already in 2016, the ministry and retailers agreed that trade would stop handing out plastic bags to customers for free in order to raise awareness among German consumers.