A Prague mystery
What the heck happens to the recycling stuff?
By Steve Pashkewych
Staff Writer
Prague is famous as a fog-shrouded, gloomy, medieval city full of strange tales and mysteries. You know them -- the Golem, the Black Dog of Vysehrad, Faust's House. But the most perplexing of them is the Prague Plastic and Paper Puzzle. What happens to the paper, plastic and glass you put into the colored recycling bins sprinkled around town?
From the Czechs I've posed this burning query to, I've gotten slightly uncertain replies ranging from "it's landfilled with the rest of the trash" to "it gets shipped to Germany because we don't have recycling facilities here." Some simply assured me that "I'm sure it gets recycled." Others, perhaps in the majority, admitted, "I dunno."
For the answer, this correspondent visited Prague City Hall a couple of times, finally speaking to an assistant to a city councilor in charge of city infrastructure. Since sending an e-mail with questions to the councilor, I have been waiting as the notorious wheels of Hapsburg bureaucracy turn at their grinding pace. In the meantime I've consulted other sources.
First, some background on the "success" of recycling in the Czech Republic compared to other nearby countries. A Mlada Fronta Dnes article, titled "We are Building New Piles out of our Garbage," concluded that Czechs are not very willing to separate their waste, and instead of sorting and recycling, the majority of household waste goes into landfills, which are overflowing. Another way of dealing with waste is incineration, but this presents problems, too. Many here think burning waste causes it to disappear, but that's not true. Not only does incineration cause air pollution (adding many toxic chemicals and compounds into the air we breathe), but every incinerator needs its own landfill for the toxic ash that is left over.
Environmentalists and officials with the Czech Ministry of Environment believe that the only way to deal with waste in the future is to sort and recycle more and more of it.
In the Czech Republic, only 10 per cent of waste is sorted by households, with the rest being thrown away. In Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, the figure is 50 per cent. Some Germans are so serious about recycling that they are willing to call the police on neighbors who don't do it.
One of the problems in the Czech Republic is lack of public interest. According to Petr Sulc, director of city infrastructure at Prague City Hall, the city has about 2,500 sites with bins for plastic, paper and glass waste. "However, people here are not used to sorting waste," Sulc said. "They do not believe it makes any difference."
There is hope for the future, however. A Lidove Noviny article reports that since 1999 a non-profit group called EKO-KOM has organized the collection, sorting and recycling of packaging waste. It receives funds from packaging manufacturers such as Coca-Cola and Karlovarske Mineral Water to promote recycling. In turn, EKO-KOM gives these funds as well as any profits from selling the sorted waste to municipalities to subsidize their costs of collecting recyclable waste. And more of this waste is being recycled year-by-year. For example, in 2001 in the Czech Republic, 124,000 tons of packaging waste was recycled, and 197,000 tons in 2002.
However, a big problem is funding. The funds that EKO-KOM provides cover only a fraction of the costs, which are made up by municipalities through tax revenue. Every year, local authorities invest hundreds of millions of crowns in sorting, collecting and recycling waste, but only get back a fraction of this cost through subsidies. In other words, even though recycling makes sense environmentally, it costs a lot more for municipalities than just landfilling the waste.
So what happens to sorted waste put into recycling bins? According to City of Prague website, the paper is collected and sent to a manual "after-sorting" line (which has a maximum output of 45 tons of sorted paper per day) where paper, cardboard, newspapers, magazines, and mixed paper are separated. The sorted paper is then sold through traders and delivered to paper mills in the Czech Republic and Slovakia where it is de-inked and recycled into new paper of various types.
For plastic, in 2001 a new line for the processing of mixed plastics began a pilot operation. Before the plastic reaches the line, it is put through a mechanical separator. Then the separated plastics are shredded and mixed according to a formula. The shredded mixture of plastics is heated and molded into "Europallets." The operator then sells the recycled plastic to markets in the European Union. However, because of the low level of market prices for recycled plastic, the City of Prague does not use the facility.
In Prague, plastics (and especially PET drink bottles) are collected and sent to a manual after-sorting line before being pressed or shredded. Sorted material ready for sale is pressed into packs or shredded into flakes and packed into plastic bags that are delivered to processors. In some towns, one use of the used PET plastic is to produce fiber, which can be made into fleece sweaters or other clothing. Mixed plastics that do not have a market are landfilled.
Finally, sorted glass is simply collected and sold to a company, Ceske Sklo, which transports the sorted waste glass to other glass producers, where it is mixed into the production of new glass.
As the Czech Republic moves toward entry into the European Union, the question of what happens to the recyclable materials collected here will become more important. As of 2001, European Union countries had to recycle 50-65 percent of their industrial and consumer packaging waste, and the Czech Republic is not yet close to this figure.
It is up to citizens here to sort more of their waste for recycling. So do your part, Praguers, and put your used paper, plastic and glass into the recycling bins. Your city (and your environment) will thank you for it.
Steve Pashkewych can be reached at pashkewych@yahoo.com.
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Last issue date: Dec. 12, 2003
