A Nation Making the Most of Its Resources, a City Running on the Future (Germany, May 2000)

A Nation Making the Most of Its Resources, a City Running on the Future (Germany, May 2000)

In 2000, Germany was highly regarded by the international community as an "environmentally advanced country," and its legal system and technological innovations to realize a sustainable society were accelerating. In the background, there was a growing environmental awareness following the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in 1986, a response to environmental problems in the former East German region that emerged after the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, and a trend toward building a recycling-oriented society in the EU as a whole. In response to these factors, Germany had positioned waste reduction and recycling as a national issue.

In this context, the news that 95% of waste is recycled at the headquarters plant of a certain company attracted attention. The 95% figure stood out from the usual limit of 50-70% recycling of waste in the manufacturing industry. Behind this achievement lies the "Circular Economy and Waste Law" enacted in Germany in 1996. This law clearly stated the concept of extended producer responsibility, including the end-of-life of products, and encouraged companies to select materials and review manufacturing processes from the design stage with recycling as a prerequisite. In fact, factories that have achieved a 95% recycling rate have highly developed material separation designs and heat recovery systems, and were widely introduced as models of how recycling and economic rationality can be compatible.

Also planned for the same period was the introduction of fuel cell buses to the market in 2002. This was not just a simple transportation renewal, but a national symbolic project for the transition to a decarbonized society, integrating renewable energy and public transportation policies. In particular, the introduction of fuel cell buses, which run on hydrogen and emit only water, was expected to be a new pillar of clean mobility in the face of worsening air pollution in urban areas caused by diesel vehicle emissions. This trend was also linked to the EU's CUTE clean urban transportation plan, and cities such as Hamburg and Stuttgart were considered for demonstration operations.

The plan to introduce fuel cell buses was also in line with the country's "Hydrogen Highway," an initiative to develop hydrogen infrastructure, and was at the core of a policy to achieve both energy independence and technological innovation. Although there were issues such as cost and the lack of a supply network, the progressive attitude of the country toward hydrogen energy as the key infrastructure of the future was worthy of special mention at the time.

Thus, in Germany in 2000, environmental policy and industrial competitiveness were being integrated in two areas: the maturation of a system for recycling waste as a resource and the introduction of next-generation transportation infrastructure. This was not mere environmental beautification, but rather the practice of "economic ecology," which seeks to balance the economy and the environment, and is documented as a pioneering example that will have a significant impact on the environmental policies of the EU and other countries.