Disposing of household rubbish in Germany is an intricate affair that requires a level of foresight and discipline from most people that would do credit to a Prussian general and must be almost impossible for the colour-blind. Every courtyard in the country is equipped with a bewildering number of containers in a variety of colours - with each colour representing a different kind of waste.

Paper goes into the blue bin, packaging belongs in the yellow one, organic waste (food, dead flowers, old teabags, etc) is dumped in the brown bin and other rubbish goes into the grey bin. There are three separate containers for bottles - one for clear glass and one each for brown and green.

A remarkable 94 per cent of Germans are sufficiently committed to protecting the environment to obey the rules, but some still insist on putting all their rubbish in a big, plastic bag and dumping it in one or other of the containers. Much of the time nobody notices - but if a German binman sees the wrong kind of rubbish in a container, he can simply refuse to empty it.

Once the rubbish is taken away, it is separated once again into what can be recycled and what cannot. Paper, metal and glass can often look forward to a new life in more or less their original form but plastic can find its way into concrete, be used to make sound-proofed walls or be melted down into oil. Organic waste is used to make compost.

Germany's recycling system has grown ever more elaborate since the launch of the Gruene Punkt (green dot) in 1991 as the symbol of what is known as the dual system of recycling. The dual system refers to the fact that householders can choose to have their rubbish collected or they can take it along to bottle banks and other containers nearby.

The system was born out of a law called the Packaging Ordinance, which required retailers and manufacturers to take back and recycle all sales packaging. Companies can be exempted from their individual obligation to take back packaging if they join a comprehensive, publicly accessible system for the collection, sorting and recycling of this material.

More than 600 firms, including most of the big supermarket chains and food manufacturers, are licensed to carry the Gruene Punkt symbol as evidence that they contribute to financing the dual system.

In 1992, just 12 per cent of German packaging was recycled but by 1997, that figure had risen to 86 per cent. The amount of packaging used by households fell by 17 per cent in the same period as producers realised that nobody really wanted such "secondary packaging" as a box around a tube of toothpaste.

Germans took to separating their rubbish so enthusiastically that, at one stage in the mid-1990s, the recycling system was unable to cope with all the grubby treasures so carefully fed into it. German waste was being exported to recycling plants all over Europe and beyond in what became known as "rubbish tourism".

New recycling plants mean that more than 90 per cent of German rubbish is now recycled in Germany, and the public is firmly committed to the Gruene Punkt. Businesses are less enthusiastic and a number of big firms have left the system, complaining that it is expensive and inefficient.

These firms are supposed to recycle their own packaging but few need to do so because, after all the effort of sorting one kind of rubbish from another, few householders bother to check whether packaging bears the Gruene Punkt symbol before they toss it virtuously into the yellow bin.