Germany

Early 20th Century

During the first half of the 20th century, waste remained an urban hygienic problem. The waste's content consisted mainly of ashes, sweepings, and leftovers, with heavy seasonal and regional variations because of particular eating and heating patterns. Local regulations, combined with a transnational knowledge transfer among European cities, dominated waste treatment, while collecting and disposal technologies differed from city to city. Albeit such disparities, the simple dumping of waste in the urban periphery was omnipresent. Waste was used for landscaping, to create hills, gain land, or for soil amelioration. A special form of this was “waste flushing” (Müllspülung), practiced in the 1930s in the outskirts of Berlin. Evacuated by barks, the waste was applied on surrounding wetlands with the help of water and pumps.

In 1896, Hamburg, which had just undergone a cholera epidemic, was the first German city to implement (British) incineration technology. In general, German cities were eager to introduce the hermetic collection system, which meant that bins were equipped with lids and fitted the notches of the collection vehicles so that nearly no dust (identified as the main peril to hygiene) would escape.

In the pre–World War I era, it was assumed that an urban dweller produced about one liter of waste (or half a kilogram) per day. The waste was collected two or three times a week. Some rare cities such as Potsdam and Charlottenburg, experimented with a separate collection, as it was known in U.S. cities: edible waste and scrap (such as leather, paper, textiles, or rags) were evacuated separately in order to feed swine or to sell the scrap to scavengers. In Munich, the urbanites’ waste traversed a separation facility, where scrap materials were sorted out manually. Scrap materials were rarely dumped but instead were reused or recuperated by ragmen since they had an economic value in the scavengers’ trade.

World Wars

World War I, the crisis of the 1920s, Nazi politics, and World War II reinforced such cultures of thrift and turned the recovery of secondary materials into an issue of patriotism and national politics. Beginning in 1914, some cities recovered leftovers for hog feeding, often supported by women's organizations. In 1916, any city with more than 40,000 people was officially obliged to separately collect edible waste, which would compensate for the deficit in foodstuffs. In addition, because of the shrinking calorific value of waste, incineration plants were shut down.

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