What actually happens to Europe's recycling?
A lot of us are pretty diligent when it comes to throwing our plastic into the dedicated bin. But how much of that stuff actually gets recycled? This week we're digging into the truth behind Europe's trash with Nico Schmidt, reporter for Investigate Europe. We're also talking about Germany's massive anti-AfD protests, and Saudi sell-out Rafael Nadal.
Resources for this episode:
'Secret plan against Germany' - Correctiv
Wasteland - Europe's plastic disaster - Investigate Europe
‘Queen of trash’ and employees arrested over Sweden’s ‘largest environmental crime’ - The Guardian
On the French border, drowning in a sea of trash - PoliticoHitster'Black Butterflies' by Priscilla Morris
Thanks for listening! If you enjoy our podcast, we'd love it if you'd consider chipping in a few bucks a month at patreon.com/europeanspodcast (many currencies are available). You can also help new listeners find the show by leaving us a review or giving us five stars on Spotify.
Many thanks to our friends at Outside/In for featuring our Oatly mini-series recently. You can find their show here.
00:22 The Europeans: coming to you soon in 200 languages?
02:35 Good Week: Standing up against the German far-right
14:35 Bad Week: Saudi sellout Rafael Nadal
38:58 The Inspiration Station: Hitster and Black Butterflies
41:50 Happy Ending: A 3,000-year-old map of the stars?
Producers: Katy Lee and Wojciech Oleksiak
Mixing and mastering: Wojciech Oleksiak
Music: Jim Barne and Mariska Martina
Thanks for listening! If you enjoy our podcast, we'd love it if you'd consider chipping in a few bucks a month at patreon.com/europeanspodcast (many currencies are available). You can also help new listeners find the show by leaving us a review or giving us five stars on Spotify.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
00’22” - INTRODUCTION
KATY: Welcome back to The Europeans, the podcast about the continent that speaks 200 languages. But around here we talk about it each week in English. How're you doing Dominic?
DOMINIC: Fine. Yeah, shame we speak in English.
K: There are now podcasts being automatically translated into other languages using AI, which I find fascinating.
D: Yeah, I find it fascinating, and actually, here's some behind the scenes news. On that series we made about the autocrats last year, one of the voiceovers – or two of the voiceovers? – were actually AI voices.
K: That had been translated from native Polish and native Bulgarian into English.
D: They were using the voices of the people that Wojciech interviewed and turned it into English, but with their voice.
K: So we can actually dream of eventually having full episodes of The Europeans in French, Spanish, Bulgarian…
D: You don't have to name all 100 languages.
K: I wasn't planning on it.
D: I just think it's quite exciting. And I was really happy with how the AI translated voice went. I thought it sounded really authentic, kind of scarily so.
K: isn't it cool to find a genuinely good, non-creepy use of AI?
D: Yeah, it's true. I was actually reading about the most boring use of AI this week, which was in Austria, where some scientists have been trying to work out if geese recognise each other's faces using AI.
K: That's not boring, what's boring about that?!
D: Okay, well, we'll make a special miniseries about that in the next few months.
K: Stay tuned for geese.
D: But for now, I should probably tell you what's coming up in the show this week. And as usual, we'll be kicking off the show with a look at who's had a good week and who's had a bad week in this continent of ours. And then we'll be calling up the journalist Nico Schmidt, from Investigate Europe to find out what he and his colleagues discovered during their huge investigation into recycling plastic in Europe. How much of that plastic that so many Europeans diligently separate from the rest of their waste actually gets recycled?That's coming up later in the show. But first, it's Good Week, Bad Week.
02’35” - GOOD WEEK
D: Who are you giving Good Week to, Katy?
K: I'm gonna call it a good week for standing up to the far-right in Germany. You'll probably have seen pictures over the weekend of the huge protests that have been taking place across the country, in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Dresden, Munich, and many other towns and cities besides. In total, the organisers reckon that as many as 1.4 million people took to the streets to protest against the far-right Alternative for Germany party, otherwise known as the AfD. And there have been some really moving scenes - people singing together about the need to defend the country against fascism…
[SOUND CLIP]
K: Lots of people carrying posters saying stop the AfD and Nazis out. And it really feels like this is ballooning into an organised movement against the AfD. There are churches and asylum seeker groups coming together to organise, there are football managers coming out against the AfD. And politicians, of course – the chancellor Olaf Scholz was among the protesters taking to the streets over the weekend.
D: So the AfD have been, they've been around for quite a long time now, haven't they? But I believe these protests have been triggered by a meeting that happened in Potsdam, right?
K: Yeah. So even though there's been real growing concern in recent months about the AfD’s rising popularity, the thing that has really lit the fuse is these revelations about a now infamous meeting that was attended by members of the AfD in a hotel in Potsdam, which is a city just outside Berlin. That meeting was actually back in November, but it wasn't until January 10 when people really found out about it. That was when Correctiv, which is an investigative news website, they dropped this absolutely bombshell report about the meeting. And the investigation is actually available in lots of languages, including English. I'll drop a link to that in the show notes. But why was this meeting so shocking? Well, it turns out that at this gathering of far-right sympathisers, a plan was discussed a plan to deport, en masse, immigrants, asylum seekers, and also people who may be German citizens, but they're of foreign origin and unwanted by the far-right because of their, quote unquote, failure to assimilate. And the idea would be to move these people to North Africa, by force. And reportedly there was a good deal of discussion of how this policy could actually be put into place if the AfD managed to come to power in Germany.
D: And this proposal was brought forward by a guy called Martin Sellner, right? Can you tell us a bit about him?
K: Yeah, so Martin Sellner, I guess you could call him a far-right influencer. So he's an Austrian, he's 35 years old. And he is the kind of handsome face of the young far-right in Europe. He comes from the Identitarian Movement, which is this movement that has spread across Europe in recent years. And it’s a racist movement. They believe in this conspiracy theory known as the ‘great replacement’, which claims that there is a plot to replace white Europeans with non-white people. But I'll just quote you this from the Correctiv investigation about what Sellner talked about at this meeting. It says, ‘The scenarios sketched out in this hotel room in Potsdam all essentially boiled down to one thing: people in Germany should be forcibly extradited if they have the wrong skin colour, the wrong parents, or aren't sufficiently assimilated into German culture, according to the standards of people like Sellner. Even if they have German citizenship.’ I don't think I need to tell you just how chilling it is for a lot of people, this idea of mass deportations from Germany being discussed by far-right activists. As always, in Germany, history is everything. And for a lot of people, this meeting just outside Berlin, it instantly evoked another meeting that took place very nearby in 1942, which was the Wannsee Conference. And it was there, really not very far away, where the Nazis planned the extermination of Europe's Jews. So even if the rise of the AfD has been worrying people from the political mainstream for a really long time already, the fact that several senior members of their party were present for this discussion of this mass deportation plan – this is really the thing that's made a lot of people say, Okay, this has gone too far.’
D: Okay, so this conference was attended by AfD people, but Martin Sellner himself is not a member of the AfD, right?
K: No, he's not. And the AfD itself has sought to distance itself from this extremely controversial meeting. They are of course a party that campaign extremely heavily against immigration, but Alice Weidel, the AfD’s co-leader, she has come out publicly in light of this controversy and stated that, quote, ‘Everyone who has German citizenship is part of our people.’ She's also sacked a senior adviser of hers who was present at this meeting, and stressed that it wasn't organised by the AfD. She has also heavily criticised the journalists for reporting on all of this in the first place, she described them as ‘left-wing activists using Stasi methods to spy on respectable citizens’.
D: Oh, come on.
K: You might be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at this phrase, ‘respectable citizens’. But that's actually something worth mentioning. The guestlist was a very interesting, very weird mix of people. So there were these three senior AfD members, there was Sellner, of course, and various members of nationalist student groups. But there were also middle class doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs. And according to Correctiv, this whole gathering was facilitated by a guy called Hans Christian Limmer, who is this well-known businessman in Germany, he's the guy behind BackWerk, which is a chain of bakeries. So there were some very, very rich people backing this group. Oh, and there are also two members of the CDU, which is the mainstream conservative party of Angela Merkel. So they've got questions to answer too. But yeah, have the AfD denied that members of theirs were at this meeting? No. Have they denied that this re-migration idea was discussed? Also no, although they've denied that it's something that they support. And by the way, this meeting doesn't appear to have been a one-off – Die Zeit and Der Spiegel have since reported that it was in fact, the seventh meeting of its kind.
D: And I guess none of this has really dented the AfD’s support, right? They're still second in the polls.
K: Yeah. So far, I haven't seen any polls that have suggested like a serious dip as a result of all of this controversy. Opinion polls suggest they've got around 23% of the country's support nationally, which is ahead of all three of the parties that are currently in the national governing coalition, so the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Free Democrats. The only party that is ahead of them is the CDU, this more mainstream conservative party. And yeah, it's kind of interesting to have a look at why. Like, I think we can attribute part of this rise in popularity to the AfD’s leadership. So Alice Weidel, the co-leader, she's a really intriguing character. She's not the kind of person you'd expect to find running a far-right party. She is a lesbian former investment banker, and she's someone who joined the party in its very early days when its thing was really being Euroskeptic rather than being super hardline on immigration. And Weidel is sticking with that Euroskepticism – she actually said this week that she wants a referendum on Germany leaving the EU. But it's funny, she used to work at Goldman Sachs – like, you might be forgiven for thinking of her as kind of archetypal globalist, rather than the leader of a party that positions itself as the home of people who are disappointed in the political establishment. But I do think that she has played a role in making it feel a little bit more socially acceptable to vote for the AfD, a little bit like what Marine Le Pen has done in France, trying to soften the party's image. But the main backdrop to this rise in popularity of the AfD is the fact that Olaf Scholz’s coalition has really not overwhelmed anyone with the amazingness of its performance. A lot of voters especially feel like the government hasn't handled the cost of living crisis well, and the AfD in particular, has done well out of more and more Germans thinking that the financial cost of defending Ukraine is growing too high. You have to remember how much cheap Russian gas was pouring into Germany's nice, comfortable economy before the war. And that's all gone now. So the AfD are now really hoping to do well in the regional elections that are taking place in September in three German states. And of course, there are European elections in June.
D: Yeah, it's quite a year for elections, isn't it?
K: Isn't this like globally, the biggest year for elections the world has ever seen? Did I read that?
D: Yeah, I think I read that too. And it feels, like, politically very volatile. I have to say I found it quite interesting, seeing how this was reported from the Netherlands, these protests. First that it was like such big news here in the Netherlands, that so many hundreds of thousands of people were protesting against the AfD, because there was like no mention of the fact in some of these articles that the PVV, which is like the Dutch version of the AfD, but according to some reports more extreme than the AfD – no mention of the fact that they won an election a few months ago here in the Netherlands, and are currently negotiating a coalition agreement. But also the words they use, the fact that in the media, they kept using this term ‘extreme right’ and ‘radical right’, in connection with the AfD – words that they are much less likely to use for the PVV. And it really annoyed me actually. I was like, ‘Come on, we have to, this is part of the problem,’ that we've normalised the far right in this country. And I was actually quite pleased. Well, firstly, to see that so many people are taking to the streets to stand up against these racist and extremist parties, but also that it was being reported on as such a big story. And yeah, that gave me a little bit of hope actually.
K: It gives me hope too.
D: I also watched a video of people singing Ode to Joy at one of these protests. And it's really a sign that I've become a totally soppy European making this podcast, but it like kind of moved me.
K: Did you start crying?
D: No actual tears, but like, I was moved. One other thing that people have been talking about is actually banning the AfD, right? That's seems like quite a big step. And I don't quite know what to think about it. But how seriously is that being talked about?
K: Yeah, I mean, it's not a new idea. But there's a lot more momentum behind it, given what's happened over the last couple of weeks. I mean, the AfD is already classified as being an extremist organisation in three eastern German states, it’s under surveillance there. But if anything, that is something that to some voters makes it look more kind of rebellious and anti-establishment. And so, this idea of banning the party altogether for being extremist – a lot of people are asking, you know, even if it could be done legally through the court system, is it really a good idea? Like, we're talking about the second most popular party in the country right now. How could that be seen as democratic? And it reminds me a lot of the conversation that we had last week with the historian Quinn Slobodian, about this history in Germany of banning things that feel like they're endangering the political centre. But yeah, I think ultimately there isn't actually that much appetite for a ban on the party, it feels like potentially a very dangerous move. So yeah, so far I guess all we can hope is that these very large, very visible protests convince some people who were flirting with the idea of voting for the AfD to maybe think again, about the morality of it. I mean, as we've already said, the polls so far don't seem to have shown a dip in their support so far. But it is pretty early days. And the optimist in me hopes that some voters would now think twice about it. Maybe that is naive, but it is for that reason that I am giving Good Week to the protesters. And I also want to give Good Week to the reporters at Correctiv who've been doing really excellent work uncovering all of this. And along with their reporting, I'm going to post a link to a piece in The Guardian about how Correctiv had been using the theatre to present its work in some quite innovative ways. It's pretty cool.
D: Sounds interesting.
14’35” - BAD WEEK
K: Who has had a bad week?
D: I'm giving bad week to the tennis superstar Rafa Nadal, a Spanish national treasure, one of the greatest male tennis players of all time.
K: And just a lovely person, right? My parents-in-law named their dog after Nadal because they liked him so much.
D: Yeah, people do love him. But he's been getting a ton of criticism this week after he signed a deal to become a tennis ambassador for the authoritarian kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
K: Whyyyy!
D: Yeah, I've been asking myself that too. I mean, it's maybe clear why Saudi Arabia would want to invest in this lovely-seeming successful tennis player, Nadal. It's part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's vision 2030, the reform agenda in which he's trying to diversify the economy so that it isn't entirely dependent on the oil money that they've been pumping out for many years. Investing in various different sports is part of his plan to make Saudi Arabia seem like an appealing and modern place to visit or do business in. But of course, Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian monarchy with a horrifying human rights record, including terrible restrictions on the rights of women, rights of LGBTQ+ people, and the harassment, imprisonment and even execution of people who peacefully campaign for human rights. So, front of the queue of people criticising Rafa Nadal this week are rights organisations such as the Human Rights Foundation and Amnesty International. And Amnesty International described his new role as the latest chapter in Saudi Arabia's relentless sportswashing operation.
K: Sportswashing, that's a new one, I haven't heard that word before.
D: It's a nice one, isn't it? If you've not heard it before, then yeah, a quick definition for that. It's basically the use of sports to distract and improve a reputation, in this case of a country. I found it quite striking to see that one of the replies to Nadal’s tweet announcing this deal with the Saudi Tennis Federation was from the widow of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Hanan Elatr, asked Nadal on Twitter not to forget the legacy of her husband. But money talks, I guess.
K: But he's got so much of it already. Like, did he really need it?
D: Yeah, I also wondered that. I actually looked up how much money he's made just from his prize money during his career, and he's made around 125 million euros. And that's not even including the sponsorship deals.
K: Oh, my goodness.
D: Yeah.
K: And how much extra is he getting from this Saudi deal? I mean, do we know?
D: No, we don't actually know. There's very little we know about this deal, apart from the fact that it is a, quote, long-term commitment to help grow the sport and inspire a new generation of tennis players in Saudi Arabia. He'll be spending some time there and there'll be a new Rafa Nadal tennis academy, but I think we can feel pretty confident that he's getting a lot of money. If you look at some of the other examples of sports stars in other sports doing deals with Saudi Arabia, Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has been paid a reported $200 million a year for playing football in Saudi Arabia. And another Spaniard, the golfer Jon Rahm reportedly received more than 500 million euros to step over to the Saudi Golf Tour.
K: These are like the budgets of small countries! It’s so insane.
D: It's so much money made from a lot of fossil fuels being extracted from the ground.
K: So is tennis even that popular in Saudi?
D: The short answer is no. But all this investment in the sport is presumably changing that a bit. And of course, Nadal is not the only person in tennis going along with the Saudi sportswashing operation. And it's even expected by some that the Women's Tennis Association are eventually going to succumb to the lure of all this money and agree to hold one of the WTA Championships in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, perhaps even this year.
K: That's interesting, in a country that expects praise for allowing women to do things like drive cars.
D: Yeah. And for exactly that kind of reason, there's quite some uneasiness within the women's tennis scene. Women's tennis actually has a long history of being linked to social activism, and there are numerous queer women playing professionally today. So I really wonder what assurances Saudi Arabia will be willing to give to the WTA that would make it okay, for women and specifically for queer women, to come and play in Riyadh. It was actually planned already for the WTA Championships to be in Saudi Arabia last year, but those plans were withdrawn after criticism from many in the tennis community, notably from two of tennis’s most beloved female tennis veterans, former rivals Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. Now that these plans seem to be being taken off the shelf again and seem to be a possibility for this year, Navratilova and Evert have picked up their campaigning. And a letter to the WTA board was leaked last month. And I'll just read you the final bit of what they wrote. They said, ‘Taking the WTA finals to Saudi Arabia would represent taking a significant step backwards, to the detriment of the WTA, women's sports and women. We ask the WTA to give thought to all these considerations.’ So that's some of the broader context. But I’m meant to be talking about Nadal. So yeah, back to him before I wind up this Bad Week. As you mentioned earlier, Katy, I think one of the things that made this story such a big story is the fact that Nadal always seemed to be one of the good guys.
K: Yeah.
D: And I read a piece in Euronews, where they interviewed loads of disappointed Spaniards who are really heartbroken that their hero would sell out like this. He's really got this reputation in Spain as being an authentic and humble guy from a little town in Majorca. He's often described as Spain's son, and the model man. And some people in this Euronews article were trying to believe that there must be some good intentions behind accepting this deal, that maybe he wants to really spread the gospel of tennis far and wide. And this possibly naive belief that the influx of tennis and sports more broadly are helping Saudi Arabia modernise.
K: it's for the greater good! And it might also allow him to build, like, the world's biggest swimming pool or whatever.
D: Yeah.
K: Have any of his tennis colleagues called him out on this? Or are they also kind of, are they turning a blind eye because they're also maybe thinking about doing dodgy deals?
D: Well, it's difficult, because if there were going to be tournaments held in Saudi Arabia, then most of them are going to have to go and play there anyway, if they haven't been playing there already, which many of them have – a lot of the men have, anyway. I watched a press conference from the Australian Open with Iga Swiatek, women's number one. And she was asked about it. And I felt a bit sorry for her, because she was trying not to say anything to offend anyone and she didn't want to throw Nadal under the bus. But she did acknowledge that things aren't easy for women in Saudi Arabia. And I thought, actually, she did quite well in trying to toe the line without getting herself in too much trouble. And yeah, maybe we shouldn't expect tennis players to be like our perfect moral compass. Maybe that's expecting too much of them. I don't know. John McEnroe, the former tennis star and famously angry tennis player, he made quite an interesting and nuanced point last week, he was very critical of the accepting of money from Saudi Arabia. But he did say people are criticising tennis players and golfers for doing something that virtually every business and government do, which is dealing with Saudi Arabia. So he was kind of questioning the idea of tennis players having to set the moral standard, which I get. But yeah, I still am shocked by the fact that Nadal is accepting a huge amount of money from them when he's already so rich. Of course, if Nadal uses his new position to speak out against Saudi Arabia's human rights record, and to change things as Amnesty International have called for, if he does that, then I might be willing to withdraw this Bad Week. But for now, it's a bad week for Rafa Nadal.
K: Maybe he's just playing the long game on us. He's going to do this deal, and then as soon as he's there, he's going to really call Saudi out on all of its wrongdoings. Maybe.
D: Maybe!
* * *
D: This week, more than ever, actually, we'd love it if you could sign up to support us on Patreon.com Why am I saying more than ever, Katy?
K: Well, let me start by saying that Patreon is a great and practical solution for people like us who make excellent but small-scale podcasts, in that it usually allows a hassle-free way of sending a little bit of money away each month, and then not thinking about it ever again. However, last weekend, we got an email from Patreon informing us that they had been forced to cancel a bunch of our supporters’ subscriptions because of a technical error, and that if these lovely people want to carry on supporting the show, they need to re-sign up. And we very much hope that everyone affected will do that. But, you know, not everyone will have seen the email about this, so we are sadly expecting a bit of a drop in subscriptions. Thanks a bunch, Patreon.
D: Yeah, naughty Patreon. But still, please support us on Patreon.com…!
K: I mean, Patreon assures that this won't happen again, and like I say, it is generally a very good service, we wouldn't use it if it wasn't. But yeah if you do enjoy putting this podcast in your ears each week, we will be extra grateful for any cash that you're able to send our way to help fill this shortfall.
D: This week we have some new Patreon supporters to thank. Thank you so much to Iesja, John, Jill, Frederik, Laure, Luigi, Eleanor, and thank you also to Stephen, Amy and Amiya for increasing.
K: Thanks, everyone!
* * *
24’54 - INTERVIEW WITH NICO SCHMIDT
D: So Katy, you were really keen to talk about recycling this week.
K: Yeah!
D: Why?
K: Well, I wanted to talk about recycling because of a very weird new story that caught my eye during our winter break, a story from Sweden. And it's the story of a waste management company called Think Pink, run by a rather colourful woman who branded herself as Sweden's queen of trash. And she and 10 of her colleagues have now been charged with what has been described as potentially Sweden's worst environmental crime in half a century. The company has been accused of illegally dumping tens of thousands of tons of waste. I should say that all of the people charged in this investigation have denied any wrongdoing. But yeah, this story really made me think about, like, what happens to our waste, and especially what happens to our recycling. Because, I don't know about you, but I generally trust my local authorities to deal with the stuff that I throw away in, you know, the most responsible way possible. And I'm also, I'm ashamed to say, one of these people who sort of diligently sorts their recycling, and I wash the plastic before I throw it in the bin. And then I kind of hope that most of this stuff is genuinely being recycled. And I sort of stop thinking about it. But is it being recycled? I mean, the scandal from Sweden gave me pause for thought. Do we really know what is happening to our waste, especially the stuff that we think and hope is being recycled? And as I was thinking about who we could talk to about this, and who might be able to tell me about how we deal with our waste across the whole of Europe, I remembered a very cool reporting project that was done last year by the journalists at Investigate Europe. That project is called Wasteland. And it's kind of a collection of mini
investigations into exactly this, what happens to our waste in Europe. So they seemed like very good people to call about this. And it turns out I was right. It's a great conversation that you're about to hear with one of the project's chief researchers, Nico Schmidt. We gave him a ring in Berlin.
K: Hi, Nico.
NICO SCHMIDT: Hello, hi.
D: Hi, thanks for joining us today. I believe you've got some farmers protesting outside your window, but we're here to talk about something completely different today, we're going to talk about plastic.
K: Plastic and recycling, yeah. And the reason I wanted to talk about this is this crazy story that I saw from Sweden a couple of weeks ago, about this waste management company that had been accused of dumping thousands and thousands of tons of waste illegally. And I actually covered a similar story to this a few years ago about these people who woke up to find mountains of trash dumped outside their houses on the border between France and Luxembourg. But I mean, how common is this kind of thing? Is it super common?
N: I would say it's not entirely uncommon. I work as a journalist as part of Investigate Europe, so I work with colleagues from other European countries together, and we did this in-depth investigation into plastic waste. And across Europe, my colleagues also looked for these illegal dumps of plastic waste. And especially in Poland, for example, my colleague was able to find quite a few of those sites there, especially in abandoned sites in Poland, my colleague was able to find plastic waste that has just been dumped. We were also able to speak to people, for example, in Turkey, where European countries are now increasingly shipping the plastic waste to, and there, the plastic waste lands under the pretension that it will be recycled. But in the end, it will just be burned. It will just be burned in open fires, for example. And this is just one way that demonstrates the dilemma that we are facing with our increasing plastic waste production, and our limited abilities in recycling this plastic waste.
K: It's really depressing because I think there's this tendency for us to throw something, a plastic item, into a recycling bin and feel kind of absolved for any guilt for using it in the first place. But do we have a sense of overall, how much of the stuff that we put into recycling bins in Europe is actually not being recycled?
N: It's actually quite a depressive number, to be honest. And the first question that we have to ask is, what do we mean when we speak about recycling, because I think many of us consumers, they have the idea, if I just take care of my plastic waste, if I don't throw it in the streets, if I sort it, if I put it in the right trash bin, then it will get recycled. And out of this old cheese packaging, one day, there will be a new cheese packaging, and it will just stay the same and it won't be a problem. But the reality is that, for example, the example that I gave you, that can never happen, because legislation in the EU, for example, prevents it for packaging of food to come from recycled packaging, because that is too polluted with certain pollutants. And so if we speak about recycling as having something that replaces virgin material, that only happens to roughly, let's say, 5% of our plastic waste. What we see still is so-called down-cycling. So we see for example, plastic waste being made from cheese packaging, into other goods, yeah? Into goods of lesser quality. That can happen.
D: Yeah, my coat is made out of recycled plastic bottles, apparently, instead of down filling they filled it with some kind of plastic bottle thing. So –
K: That's cool!
D: Yeah, I guess occasionally something clever gets made out of it. But yeah, I guess it is depressing how low the percentages of stuff that actually gets turned into something that can be used. And I'm also really struck how different the recycling systems are from country to country within Europe. I was recently working in northern Italy for a few months and the recycling system there was intimidatingly strict, the municipality were tracking everyone's bin bags and handing out fines if you were caught not separating your trash properly. So it made me wonder, do you have any sense of which the countries are, or maybe the regions, where recycling systems are working really well? And on the other side, who are the worst offenders for not encouraging their citizens to recycle?
N: That is a good question, we have to say that we at Investigate Europe, we tried to map this across Europe. But to be fair data is quite scarce when it comes to this. And that is also due to different provisions. So for example, some countries where you would assume that recycling is working pretty well, if you look close, it's actually not. So for example, I'm based in Berlin, Germany. And when you look here, for example, in the last few years, more and more of that waste actually ends up in incinerators. And that is a huge problem. That is also a huge problem in other countries. And when we look at the plastic waste that we generate in Europe, it used to end up in China, a lot of them. And then at one point in 2018, China felt strong enough, and they said, ‘Let's put an end to this.’ And they banned the import of plastic waste from Europe. And now it's a huge issue because we from Europe had a lot of plastic waste that we gave to China, and what are we going to do with it now? We spoke already about this illegal dumping, something that may now happen to that waste, but something that is also happening now is that we are burning this. And by that we create a new lock-in effect, because we build incinerators. And they want to be filled.
D: To what extent could some of these problems be fixed by EU-wide legislation? I mean, is there actually an EU-wide recycling policy in place already?
N: What we see the EU doing is to really struggle with this problem. If we speak about the incinerators for example, the EU is still financing the building of more of those, yeah. In Poland, we see that roughly 40 new incinerators are going to be built and that is financed with money from the European Union. But at the same time, we also see that the European Union is quite committed to solving this problem. But their commitment is, until now, pretty much just putting out bold statements. So I think it was in 2015 that Frans Timmermans, who was back then the Vice President of the Commission, said we need to have this circular economy and that is a word you hear everywhere when you speak about waste. And he was speaking about, ‘we need to close the loop.’ But unfortunately, so far, they have failed. They have put out their vision for the circular economy, and they come forward with 50 action points, but they are super broad. You know, there's like one of the 50 action points is, ‘Keep the oceans clean.’ But we have to ask ourselves, is that really kind of the level at which we will eventually succeed?
K: It's quite a big point on the to do list, there.
N: It is, right? Yeah.
K: I mean, if I was to ask you to dream big, and imagine a really good European recycling policy, what would it look like do you think?
N: I mean, in an investigation, you meet so many people, and that's one of the privileges of being a journalist, you can look behind so many closed doors, speak to people. And one of the people that I spoke to, was a person who used to work in the EU Commission for a long time, he was kind of the expert on plastic waste. And I sat down with him for a longer chat. And when I asked him for solutions, he said, ‘I don't see any.’ I think that's super depressing. It's heartbreaking. It's difficult to hear. And I'm only a journalist who can kind of try to put the puzzle pieces together. But when I also think about other conversations that I had, I think the only solution that we will have to this, as consumers, is to be really aware of that and try just to use less and less plastic, if that is possible.
K: It comes back to consumers in the end, and our individual responsibilities.
N: It does to a certain extent. Well, and then of course, there are other steps that can be taken. Yeah, if you look at most of the plastic packaging that you get in the supermarket, for example, there is no way to recycle that. For me, before this investigation, plastic was plastic. But apparently there are many different types of plastic. And when you look at these cheese packages, for example, they consist of many different types that are glued together, but they are glued together. And there is no way to tear those apart again, to recycle them. And so that's already a structural problem. There are no moves in order to address this. The EU has done some. So that is one step that they have taken, in fact, to put forward rules as to how recyclable packaging has to be. In the end however, as I said before, it will most likely be down-cycling and not recycling so much.
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D: There was quite a lot in there that was actually quite depressing. But I guess it's good to know about what's actually going on with our trash, and be aware of what packaging we should avoid when doing our shopping in the supermarket.
K: Yeah, I think my main takeaway was that as an individual person – I just have to try harder to use less plastic as as an individual. Like, I have got to stop using the comfort of the recycling bin as a justification for not thinking too much about it, because the truth of what happens to that stuff is so disheartening. But of course, there is other stuff that we can do, and I don't want to sound defeatist. So go lobby your politicians for better policies, people, both locally and nationally. And your MEPs.
D: I actually feel really guilty because you've been talking about diligently separating your waste and cleaning up plastic. But here in Amsterdam, I've become really lazy because we have robots that do it for us.
K: Oh!
D: They did a study and worked out that if they use this – I mean, I'm not sure it's actually a robot – if they use this machine, it's better at dividing out the plastic from the non-plastic than us stupid humans when we do it ourselves.
K: That sounds good. I'm all for using the robots.
D: Yeah, come on robots, help us sort out our trash.
K: I mentioned in the interview that I myself had covered a story of illegal cross-border dumping. It was a few years ago now. But it was a pretty crazy story that I reported from the border of France and Luxembourg. So I'll post the link in the show notes for anyone who's interested in that. And of course, I will also post a link to the excellent Wasteland project, which explores the way in which we dispose of European trash from all kinds of different angles. There's a particularly good piece about the North-South divide that there is in Europe when it comes to these schemes that allow you to bring back bottles and get some money for it. Check it out. The link is in the show notes.
37’54” - THE INSPIRATION STATION
K: What have you been enjoying this week?
D: Well, I wanted to talk about a game that I discovered over the winter break. It's a new party game that I loved and was loved by everyone I played it with, I think across all different generations. It's a music game and it's called Hitster, have you heard of it?
K: No, but I love games, tell me.
D: It's connected to Spotify via QR codes that you scan, or the DJ scans, and what's great about it, what makes it so appropriate for multigenerational gatherings, is that the aim of the game isn't to identify the song and the artist, although you can get extra points for that. The aim of the game is to correctly guess when the song you hear was released.
K: Oh, fun!
D: And you each create a timeline for the selection of songs you have played. And I know I'm not making it sound as fun as it actually is, I'm always bad at describing games. But believe me, it's really great. It was invented by a guy called Marcus Carleson in Stockholm. And he funded it initially via Kickstarter. But it's now been bought up by the Dutch game makers Jumbo.
K: So it's like a physical game that you have to buy? I can't just play on Spotify?
D: You have to buy it. And you get all these cards with QR codes on the back of them and dates on the other side. It's been released now in many different countries, because you're probably want to listen to the songs from the historical charts of the specific country you grew up in, which makes it a little bit difficult for someone like you or me who are living in a country that we didn't grow up in. But there are enough songs in common with the Dutch charts that I still enjoyed it. And I've had some very lively and loud evenings. Apologies to all my neighbours.
K: Nice.
D: What have you been enjoying Katy?
K: Well, actually, something that I'd like to do much more of this year is include more recommendations in this bit of the show from you, the listeners. So I'm kicking it off this week with a recommendation from Owen that he posted in our Patreon supporters Facebook group, and it's for a novel called Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris, which was long-listed for the Women's Fiction Prize last year and it has had brilliant reviews. Owen says, ‘It's an absolutely heart-wrenching book about Bosnia's gradual descent into war in the 90s, told from the perspective of an artist and professor living in Sarajevo. The concept sounds ridiculously bleak, but it's actually full of so much hope. And it's about human nature and kindness, really, even through darkness.’ Yeah, I always find that novels can be a very human way of understanding conflict, especially past conflict. So I'm definitely gonna check this one out. Thank you for sharing Owen. It is called Black Butterflies, and it is by Priscilla Morris. And if you've got something to recommend for us, give us a shout. You can find us on Instagram, Twitter, and Threads, just type in The Europeans podcast.
40’46” - HAPPY ENDING
D: Well, Katy picked up a cultural recommendation from the Facebook Patreon group, and I picked up a happy ending story from one of our Patreon supporters. So thank you all for doing our work for us. Thank you, Anne, for this story. It's a story from the northeast of Italy, where a stone disc with some strange markings on it has been baffling researchers since it was discovered a few years back. It was found in a hill fort and is thought to be 3000 years old. And the good news, the happy news, is that finally there is a theory as to what this mysterious stone was used for. It's been proposed by a group of astrologers. And they believe that the stone disc worked as a map of the stars in the sky. It could have been used to help follow the seasons, to know what agricultural tasks should be done when. One of the most interesting things about this research is that there are 29 marks on the stone and 28 of them appear to match up with the stars in the sky. But there is, however, a 29th mark, which rather baffled the astrologers. But they now think maybe this 29th mark is from a star that is no longer visible in our sky. So it might have turned into a supernova or a black hole or something.
K: Wow!
D: All of this is speculation, but if it is correct, it would be quite an amazing discovery because it is about 3,000 years old, and up until now the oldest known map of the night sky is from 135 BCE. A map which is attributed to the Greek astronomer Hipparchus.
K: Do you know what, we've spent some of this podcast marvelling at, you know, how artificial intelligence can translate people's voices into different languages, and your amazing plastic-cleaning Dutch recycling machine. But this is a nice reminder that technology has been really cool for thousands of years.
D: Yeah, it is. I wonder what the farmers of 3,000 years ago would think if they suddenly saw one of our apps that makes you look at the sky and identify what the stars are.
K: They’d probably think we were really dumb and we should just look up.
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Actually, speaking of farmers, there is a high probability that you are listening to this in a country where farmers have been protesting recently. And even if you're not in one of these countries, we all eat. So you're gonna want to hear next week's interview about why Europe's farmers are so pissed off at the moment. Don't miss it, it is a very good interview for connecting the stuff that's on your plate with the policies that get made by powerful people.
D: If you'll miss us for a week, then come and join us on Instagram @europeanspodcast, you can follow us on X at @europeanspod, or you can email us, hello at europeanspodcast.com, if you have any feedback or ideas.
K: The show was produced this week by me and Wojciech Oleksiak. And it was co-hosted by my lovely friend Dominic Kraemer.
D: Sweet.
K: We'll see you next week everyone.
D: Bye guys.
K: Tschüß!