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They hang like trophy fish after a good day's angling, a clutch of plump yellow plastic bags cinched at the top by black drawstrings and held aloft at each house on the perimeter fences that are a fixture of the orderly German neighbourhood.

Inside the bags is a jumble of meat trays, milk cartons, candy wrappers, soup cans, juice bottles and crumpled foil, a mixed blessing of lightweight packaging made out of every conceivable polymer and metal. Collected by consumers and left out to be picked up every two weeks all across Germany, the yellow bags and bins are part of a landmark system that puts the onus on manufacturers to limit their packaging and pay for the cost of recycling everything in which they sell their products.

Through such systems, Germany has been leading the world in green living, with a history of environmentalism that spawned the Green Party, an ordered society that has long adopted recycling as a cultural norm, strict plans to scale back the amount of household waste sent to landfill, and technology that makes sorting the recyclable materials ever-easier.

Germany currently recycles into new products or fuel some 62 per cent of its lightweight packaging, compared with about 20 per cent in neighbouring countries such as France and Austria, which largely incinerate the materials or don't collect mixed packaging in the first place.

In 2006, each German collected an average of 64 kilograms of recyclable packages, glass and paper — saving the amount of energy needed to power 1.1 million households, says Duales System Deutschland (DSD), the company that administers the system.

But if anything, the package recycling program has been too successful, says Norbert Voell, a DSD spokesman. Under the country's Green Dot (Der Gruene Punkt) system, which began in 1991, companies that sell packaged goods must pay licence fees to help cover costs of the private "dual system" that collects and recycles packaging. The fees encourage companies to limit their packaging, and entitles them to display a green dot on each package to show they are part of the €1.5-billion system. Yet an increasing number of Trittbrettfahrers or "free riders" have not been paying in — or even counterfeiting the dots — causing alarm that the program might no longer be able to pay for itself.

New rules that took effect this month require every manufacturer that uses packaging to produce a certificate of compliance showing it contributes to the dual system.

With limited space for landfill and fewer natural resources to make new products, Europeans have long espoused recycling, such as the bottle collection bins separated into white, brown and green glass that are dotted around each German community (with precise hours set for when bottles can be thrown into the bins).

Germans are spirited rule-followers, and enthusiastic recyclers. Berlin Recycling, which is responsible for paper collection around the city, has adopted a loud orange-and-white checkerboard motif for its program, emblazoned on trucks and printed on a range of novelty items from cigarette lighters to tote bags. The mascots of its program are the Tonnenboys, workers who sign autographs at public events in their orange coveralls, muscles bulging, and pose each year for a pin-up calendar that sells for €16 (about $25).

Retailers long ago stopped giving out free shopping bags, with most consumers carting along baskets and bins to the grocery store. This isn't just about being eco-friendly, but also saves shoppers money; they also prefer to pack their own groceries at the check-out, elbows flying, rather than paying the added cost of having clerks do it.

Mr. Voell says cost is also a factor in the success of the recycling pickup, because Germans must pay for the trash they put out, but not for recycling collection. At his home in Munich, trash is weighed at the garbage truck. Trash collection costs his family of four about €150 a year, while "a package in the yellow bin doesn't cost me anything."

The green dot system, of course, is built into the price of goods Germans buy. A dairy, for example, pays a licence fee amounting to about €1 cent (about 2 cents) for each yogurt cup it sells so the cup can be collected, sorted and recycled. Companies can reduce their costs if they limit their packaging.

Most toothpaste is sold in tubes alone, rather than being boxed, while soup cans weigh about half what they did a decade ago because they use less metal.

Germany has closed landfill sites and dramatically reduced the amount of household garbage in them. With plans to stop all such landfill by 2020, the government in 2005 prohibited the burying of waste unless it has been made inert, in most cases by incineration, which costs €150 to €200 per tonne.

In the past 10 years, meanwhile, the cost of recycling packaging has decreased 75 per cent to just €100 per tonne, Mr. Voell says. "Nowadays, it is far more affordable to carefully sort more recyclables for subsequent high-quality recovery, than simply to dispose of them as waste."

The same equation — and thinking — does not hold true across the Atlantic, where putting trash in landfill sites can cost as little as $15 (Canadian) a tonne, notes Alexander Wolf, the North American sales engineer for TiTech, a European company that makes automated sorting equipment for recycling plants.

With countries around the world struggling with the garbage issue, many jurisdictions are studying or following Germany's examples. The green dot program is now used in 25 countries as a symbol of packaging recycling, and some degree of producer responsibility.

Special to The Globe and Mail