The European capital cities, Berlin and London, running the third and the fourth richest economies in the world, both produce about a metric ton of rubbish for each household per year. But when it comes to disposing of their citizens’ waste, the comfortable similarities end.
    London, and Britain as a whole, is in the middle of a waste crisis. Today, the environment secretary, Margaret Beckett, is presiding over a waste summit to try to find out why the UK is not going to reach its 25% recycling and composting (转制成堆肥) target by 2005; currently, it is managing 11%
    By comparison, Berlin and Germany know exactly where they are going. Although Berlin has been the capital for less than a decade, and has had east and west to unite, it has already reached 40% recycling. The city has one ambition: to have no rubbish to dump or burn in 20 year’s time. So far, the city has not decided quite how, but it is developing new technologies and moving steadily in the right direction. London, by comparison, has a chaotic system. The 33 boroughs all have different recycling systems.
Ken Livingstone, who since taking office as mayor has published a brand-new waste management strategy for the capital, is responsible for sorting out this hotch potch. One of the most contentious issues both for London and Berlin is incineration, with both cities burning a large proportion of their waste---London 20% and Berlin 32%
    Here again Berlin has made decisions and London is uncertain. Berlin has a state of the art incinerator in the 1970s and upgraded constantly until in the 1990s it is impossible to detect any emissions but warm gases. The city has abandoned plans to build another and instead wants to make the existing one redundant by reducing the waste so there is none to burn