Recycling rates have been stagnating for years, while at the same time the packaging industry is posting record sales. Waste has developed into a lucrative business. The environment hardly plays a role anymore. Yet the Green Dot, introduced in 1991, was aimed at waste avoidance and recycling. The goal was a closed-loop recycling economy – without any waste at all. The results are sobering: each of us still throws away an average of 617 kilogrammes of waste per year. Only Cyprus surpasses Germany in a European comparison. The collection regulations are often absurd. Because even the same things have to be separated. The plastic clothes hanger ends up in the residual waste, the plastic yoghurt pot as packaging waste in the yellow bag. The results are even more absurd: Only one third of the painstakingly sorted waste is actually recycled, the rest is mostly used as fuel in power plants.