Canada ranks second, with 3.75 pounds per person and the Netherlands is third, with 3 pounds. Germany and Sweden generate the least, with just under 2 pounds per person per day.

Why, then, are north Bohemia's abandoned warehouses bursting at the seams with German waste products?

The short answer is osmosis. In green-conscious Germany, tough laws force the industrial sector to keep it clean. Despite the best efforts of families to recycle plastic bottles, industry produces by far the largest proportion of waste, generally around six times as much as household waste. Thus, proper disposal is one of the major expenses for companies in neighboring Saxony.

The Czech Republic is decades behind in drafting, let alone enforcing, such environmental crackdowns. Thus, with a porous border, things move from an area of high pressure to one where there's nearly none.

It's extremely easy, and tempting, to wax political when it comes to a historical rival, and sometimes occupier, literally dumping on a small nation like the Czech Republic. Právo commentator Jiří Franěk argues in a recent column that "If a Czech wants to get rid of something easily, quickly and secretly, he dumps it in the nearest forest at night. The Germans, however, are willing to spend expensive diesel fuel and run the risk of a random border check when they drive their waste as far as to the Czech Republic."

But a closer look at the economics of dumping makes it quite clear that the fuel involved in trucking waste to Bohemia is a bargain compared to the cost of proper disposal at home.

"Germans are less afraid to behave unlawfully in the Czech Republic than they are in their homeland," Franěk adds. But that assertion also misses the point. Germany, like most Western nations, has highly competent commercial lawyers.

From 1991 to 1992, the German playing-card company Schmidt-Cretan shipped 480 metric tons (529 short tons) of hazardous chemicals to Albania, including toxaphene and phenyl mercury acetate, both of which have been banned in Western Europe since 1983. One liter (0.7 gallon) of toxaphene can contaminate 2 million cubic meters (528 million gallons) of water, killing every fish.

Albania got about 6,000 liters from Germany — legally classified as "humanitarian aid" for the agriculture sector. Disposal of the waste in Germany would have cost $4,800–6,600 (114,240–157,000 Kč) per ton.

Under regulations in place at the time, the shipment was completely legal: 1992 rules required only that the exporter obtain a notification of export listing the reasons for the shipment, something easily covered by a contract with the Albanian company taking on the waste.

Toxic waste laws and enforcement have obviously been tightened and loopholes closed since then, largely because the case generated much embarrassing publicity. Nevertheless, because of the economic forces involved, such waste fuels a permanent race between regulators and commercial legal minds, each endeavoring to stay ahead of the other.