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Recycling not as tidy as it appears

Toxic consumer waste is in landfills; contracts are suspect

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
April 4th, 2007 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
A worker sorts through debris in search of recyclable items on Domeček odpady's lot in Prague 10.
The European Commission recently reported that the Czech Republic boasts the highest rate of sorting plastic recyclables on the Continent. But, as it turns out, this recognition is more like the lone feather in a tattered cap.
Low rates of overall household recycling, disagreements over waste disposal contracts, as well as mishandling of toxic materials, mar the country’s recycling record, and raises questions about waste-disposal practices.
For one, hazardous waste dumped in city bins is ending up in landfills, contaminating water and soil, says Radimír Halberštát, the owner of a private waste-management company in Prague 10.
“All the people pretend this isn’t happening,” said Halberštát, who owns Domeček odpady. He’s referring to the large bins Pražské služby puts out every few months for people to dispose of their furniture and other large items.
He says the problem is that people often throw in refrigerators (which contain harmful fluorocarbons), car batteries, televisions, computers and other toxic waste despite a label on the bins ordering them not to do so.
Zdeněk Matoušek of Pražské služby acknowledged the problem.
“At this point, it goes straight to a landfill. There were attempts to recycle, but not anymore,” he said.
But toxic-waste collection does have a system: Prague residents are supposed to take their potentially toxic items to one of 10 centers that dispose of such materials properly. Turning in old TVs and other such items to these centers costs nothing. But sometimes it’s just easier — though forbidden — to chuck them in the recycling bins.
About half of 1 percent of all solid waste in the Czech Republic is toxic, according to Ivo Kropáček of the environmentalist organization Friends of the Earth. There are no special waste bins for hazardous materials, but some areas of the country have mobile collection centers, he said. Some stores will also take an old TV if a customer buys a new one.
Halberštát lost the bid to handle the oversize-waste bins six years ago to Pražské služby, which the city owns. In January, he lost another bid for city waste to a company he says has ties to City Hall. Halberštát says improper bidding procedures and guidelines were used to grant the bid to his competitor.
Růžena Horváthová, City Hall’s specialist on waste issues who handled the contract bidding early this year, said that the “procedures were not improper” and referred all other questions to the city’s spokesman, Jiří Wolf.
Wolf said he knows nothing about the issue and that there are about 400 bids the city currently has out, in all areas. He then referred questions to Jan Winkler, head of the department of environmental protection. Winkler said the bidding was ordinary and that City Hall suspected Halberštát might have been measuring citizens’ waste improperly.
 
Big picture
Although the Czech Republic sorts more plastic packaging than any other European country, it is not the best in overall recycling, and lags far behind Western Europe, Kropáček said.
Plastic packaging accounts for about 10 percent of all household waste. “So we are first in the separation of this 10 percent,” he said. However, about half of all household waste in Germany, Belgium and Austria is recycled, while that figure is just 16 percent in the Czech Republic, he said.
The European Union estimates waste production across the Continent increased 10 percent between 1990 and 1995, but that municipal waste fell in Germany and the Netherlands during that period.
Biowaste from kitchens and gardens make up a third of all household waste, according to Kropáček, and the country is only beginning to develop a system to recycle it.
Czechs are good about recycling plastic because of their communist past, he said. Under communism, a superb system for glass recycling got Czechs into the habit of thinking about reuse. When glass bottles were emptied, they were taken to a center to be washed and reused. In return, the consumer would get a small amount of money for the bottles. Kropáček said these bottles were used up to 20 times.
In 1991, the first plastic water bottles were introduced here and continued to grow in popularity, he said.
Petr Štěpánek, a Prague 4 city councilor and Green Party activist, said people are also motivated to recycle because they can get rid of such waste for free, while they have to pay a utility fee based on volume to dispose of general waste. The profits waste-handlers make from recycled paper pulp and plastics help support the recycling system.
But the country could still improve its recycling habits. A way to do this would be to have doorstep recycling, which encourages better separation of recyclables, Kropáček said.
Naďa Černá contributed to this report.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


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