Is the bottle bank half full or half empty?

Almost 95% of the glass which Finns use each day is recycled. In Greece, less than 30% of glass is recycled.

The picture is very similar with other categories of municipal waste (the stuff produced every day by households and small businesses that goes into a bin and is traditionally collected by some local public service).

The Nordic countries and Germany tend to be on top, the EU’s southern and eastern members at the bottom, and the rest somewhere in between. What accounts for these differences?

There is no single explanation for why the Belgians recycle 95% of their glass and the Portuguese just 35%, or why the Dutch dump just 1.44% of their waste in landfills, where it contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, while the corresponding figure in Ireland is 60%. But Hannah Hislop, a policy officer at the UK’s Green Alliance, points out that countries such as Germany or Sweden have historically had low landfill rates - to do at least in part with geology - and hence started out from a favourable position when environmental concerns entered policymaking, while the UK, Ireland, Spain and Italy are faced with the challenge of cutting back the traditionally high share of rubbish that is not recycled.

At the same time, different taxation and collection schemes mean that private households face different incentives when deciding whether to recycle or throw away, for example through the availability of kerbside recycling.

If recyclables are picked up at the doorstep every week, recycling is easy. If consumers need to lug their empty wine bottles to a collection point that may be inconveniently located and overflowing, the temptation to throw away is much stronger. The costs of throwing rubbish away are also often opaque to households.

Many German communes charge residents for waste collection based on the number of people living in a given household, with an additional tax on standardised rubbish bags, while the UK is the only major European country not to have a separate waste tax (it includes collection in the council tax).

The Confederation of European Paper Industries (CEPI) wanted to know more precisely what influenced paper recycling rates - which in 2006 stood at 64% in the EU plus Norway and Switzerland, making paper the most recycled product - and took a hard look at demo-graphic, geographical and socio-economic factors. None of these, however, showed any strong correlation with recycling rates. What did was environmental awareness, says CEPI’s recycling director, Jori Ringman. An awareness-raising campaign across municipalities in Spain - a middling country on paper recycling - resulted in significantly higher collection rates, confirming the findings. This suggests that it is policies and attitudes that affect varying national performance on recycling rather than ‘harder’ factors that are more difficult to affect.

In the UK, recent plans to allow some local councils to restrict the amount of household waste that they collect provoked a shrill media response and complaints about a ‘European-style bin tax’. One newspaper warned: "Microchips in dustbins spy on three million." The Germans, by contrast, see nothing wrong in spying on their neighbours to make sure they do not throw out recyclable waste.

Almost 95% of the glass which Finns use each day is recycled. In Greece, less than 30% of glass is recycled.

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