Trashopolis S02 E06: Berlin

Berlin a city destroyed by by the end of the war Berlin looked like a pile of rubble city still battles with trash from its tumultuous past begin noting there are over 3000 unexploded bombs here in Berlin but from the rubble in ruins Berlin has built one of the most innovative and effective trash systems in the world as far as trash is concerned but in the state of the art [Music] Berlin the epicenter of two world wars has a tormented affair with trash when the firing stopped and their City lay in ruins Berliners had to dig out from the trash piles war and rebuild today the city of 3.5 million has one of the most innovative trash systems in the world so cutting-edge they don't even have a dump waste management expert dr. Thomas Klockner we closed out the landfill sites in 2005 that was necessary because they were harmful to the environment and from that time on we had to find a way what to do with 1 million tons of waste to survive without a dump Berliners had to get serious about recycling [Music] we recycle almost everything that comes into our hands from household either we make energy out of it or we use it in an incineration plant and then the steam that is coming up in the process is being used to produce warmth or electrical energy most of Berlin's trash ends up here at the mechanical stabilization trash plant where it's dumped into a massive bunker then scooped up by a mechanical claw big enough to wrap around a garbage truck then conveyor belts carry the trash through the plant where it's sorted by size and type and the sorting process is a big tumbler with holds and all the waste that is smaller in the hole Falls through the hole and sorted out a small waste non combustibles like metals ceramics and stone are removed the rest of the trash is dried and compacted into super energy pallets called sausages so with this little sausage you can replace oil that's why it is refuse-derived fuel these magic pallets made from trash are used to power factories or to generate electricity and Berlin's trash innovation goes beyond this sausage factory we are trying out the most recent technologies German engineers have designed a garbage truck that runs on garbage where gas extracted from fermenting trash will power the trucks themselves that's the future music it's garbage running on garbage and you could use the trucks for organic waste collection or for regular waste collection doesn't matter the result a completely self-sufficient trash system [Music] Merlin's principle waste collector BSR employs more than 1700 workers on each year they collect more than 1 million tons of trash on top of that 1 million tons of not separate household waste we collect another 450,000 tons which are already separated people jokes that in Berlin it takes four different containers to trash a tea bag the tag goes into the paper bill the staple into the metal bin the string into household waste and the tea bag itself into the compost jokes aside it's not far from the truth we have a blue benefit paper we have a yellow bin for licensed packing material a brown bin for organic waste two bins for collecting gas one is for colored glass and the other one is for white glass on top of it we have the orange bin that collects dry recycling material that does not fit into the packing material it always fits garbage processing here has become ultra efficient [Music] but it's a system with a dirty past aundrea Schultz Fleischman a director at BSR explains in the 17th early 18th century there was a system in Berlin called the gas and meister that were people that were cleaning up the streets and if they found dirt or garbage in front of a house they were allowed to throw it back into the owners window and so I think this was pretty efficient at those times you could throw your neighbors trash right back in his face and from this Berliners developed one of the first urban recycling programs in the world the earliest recycling was in 1903 when three different fractions of garbage were collected food ashes and the rest the rest was dry substances like metal wood rags garbage collection in Berlin remained humble until Chancellor Adolf Hitler came to power [Applause] historian armed Bauer camper when Hitler seized power in 1933 he initiated a huge program of rearmament [Music] it really created a problem for Germany because they couldn't afford this we all want program and that's why they wanted to save water theory at any price caught in the depths of the Great Depression with resources scarce Hitler turns to recycling Hitler capitalized on the concept of recycling because that's what he needed to do use the useless was the slogan a Nazi propaganda promoted the message aggressively but Hitler's motivation for recycling ran deeper he also despised how the West dealt with their trash in forced to save raw materials because he capitalist waste society as the Nazis chorded was to be superseded so it was a political and economic reason and be an ideological reason [Applause] by 1938 over 17,000 tons of recyclable materials were recovered in Berlin Hitler used organizations like the Hitler Youth to mobilize to collect raw materials the Hitler Youth went door to door collecting valuable raw materials for the war effort rags and leather became uniforms paper was recycled for Nazi propaganda and medal was repurposed for aircraft submarines tanks and ammunition powered in parked by trash German troops stormed across Europe until eventually the tides of war turned and Berlin was bombed to the ground [Music] Robbin Dudley Williams is a historian for the Berlin underworlds Association by the end of the war the city had been bombed day and night for many many years total of about 40% of Berlin's buildings were now unlivable my T Berlin had been reduced to a city of trash and rubble those who remained faced the daunting task of rebuilding and of course around them was 60 to 70 million cubic meters of rubble trash rubbish so before they could even think about rebuilding the city at the war's conclusion they had to clean up this mess and of course one of the major problems with this was the fact that many of the men had been killed in the war ten million German men had either died or be made prisoners of war so the women were conscripted to do this age fifteen to fifty women were expected then to work of course in exchange for ration cards they would clean up the rubble working typically in chain-gang they were called the true MuRF Rouen the rubble women and these frauleins cleared the way for a modern metropolis [Music] today Berlin is trash heaven the city of 3.5 million reduces reuses and recycles over 550,000 tons of garbage a year more efficiently than any other major city in Europe and this culture of trash has its roots in the past at the end of the Second World War Berlin and lay in ruins and it took an army of women to dig out from the piles of rubble trash was now all that was left for gangs of women desperate to survive historian Robin Dudley Williams they would be passing it from hand to hand at the end of a chain gang they would usually form a pile so that they could stack the bricks up neatly for one so they could be picked up and also so they could measure the amount of work that the woman had done desperate to survive the rubble women salvaged whatever they could from the trash and they hid it in places like this a lost bunker recently discovered filled with a secret cache of war trash [Music] with Berlin lying in ruins the end of the war in 1945 people had to be quite creative and turned the kinds of things they found amongst the rubble into things that they could use for example you can see right here that they've taken a helmet and simply got a few holes in it and turn it into a colander [Music] need a cup well all you have to do is take apart a punt so fall store a bazooka shell that has not been fired off and used the front part now the gas masks became oil lamps bombshells transformed into tea kettles and shoes were made from old tires pieces even a stove built from a bomb what couldn't be salvaged was hauled to the edge of town and dumped in the end it ended up in 80 different locations throughout the city for example the biggest of the rebel mountains is directly behind me this is the typhus back typhus burg also known as West Berlin's Devil's mountain is made from twelve million cubic meters of trash piled over a hundred metres high the remains of more than 400,000 destroyed buildings but buried beneath the rubble is another building dedicated to the Nazi dream that never was we are currently on top of the typhus bag which is a mountain of rubble piled upon top of what was the unfinished fare technician faculties which was the planned military academy that was part of a larger plan to turn berlin into a world capital the dream of Albert Speer the architect and Adolf Hitler after the war the Allies tried to blow up the Nazi college but Speer made it blast-proof so they buried it under a mountain of war trash making Devil's mountain the highest point in Berlin and the perfect vantage point for Western spies Nigel Dunkley was a spy back then this is a trash heap it's a building trash heap it's fantastic is ginormous it's huge it's the only elevated piece of land around this part of Brennan at the end of World War two Berlin was cut in half the Western Allies took West Berlin and the Soviets took the east and this trash heap became the front line of a new war the Cold War it became one of the Cold War's most important top-secret listening stations it was the single biggest tear in the Iron Curtain we could operate in communist East Germany where there were over two-thirds of a million armed men they were what we were interested in monitoring assessing and worrying but we were an island of freedom surrounded by a sea of bright red communism from their mountain of trash the West could spy in every direction if you're going to listen to your enemy's radio and radar transmissions then you had to have 360 degree coverage that's why they're spherical in shape because the antenna had to be able to range in every direction the geodesic domes that we have here used to have the quaint nickname amongst the Brits here as the golf ball factory or the condom Factory that's a bit rude but that's also what we used to call it whatever information spies couldn't gather from Devil's mountain they dig up in the trash trash during the Cold War played a fantastically unbelievably important role in intelligence gathering [Music] back then Nigel would have loved to have slipped past this top-secret blast-proof door this is the zosyn complex this bunker that we're in was the main command post bunker for the entire German armed forces ready just in time for Hitler to start his second world war and when the war ended the Soviets moved in [Music] and when the Cold War got particularly cold and became possibly a nuclear threat then they decided to reactivate it and they turned it into a massive Cold War command and control bunker the Soviets reinforced the complex to withstand a nuclear bomb where we are right now deep underground is one of the very last vestiges of the Cold War what is left over in this bunker from the Second World War and from the Cold War is an amazing mix of technical equipment resistors capacitors insulators firefighting systems nuclear biological and chemical protection systems right down to the incinerators that they needed quite large ones for safely and securely disposing of all their paper trash trash was one of our major targets a small team of us usually by night would have to go through their trash and what a fantastic take of information we got from their trash Dunkley and his team risked their lives approaching a trashy was a dangerous activity we would listen to see or hear rather if there were any Soviets moving around on the trash heap as well a military vehicle door slamming dogs barking we'd hear all of these usual greetings and the vitamins hey what's up and Bush Lee let's go or by diem means let's go in the vehicle and that was good when we heard by the old Bush Lee that meant they were going we could then get onto the trash heap and ravaged the place the Soviets burnt most of their trash but not all of the paper ended up in the incinerator in a stroke of tactical genius Western spies managed to cut off the supply of toilet paper to the Soviet bunker the result paper sometimes highly classified documents would get used in the latrine it was quite common for Soviet officers and their soldiers to go for a walk into the woods do what they had to do they didn't care less they used any kind of paper that they could that paper held valuable intelligence we came along and go pulling apart some disgusting smelly nauseating trash to get at what we wanted to get hurt amid the stench of the soviet latrine was a gold mine of Intel it's amazing what we got sometimes we found out entire radio codes secret intelligence services notes frequencies used on exercises how good they were how bad they were what they could do was all written in the trash it's a risky business because you need a torch held very close to the ground not emitting too much light [Music] you had to be able to decipher Russian Cyrillic handwriting using a red filter torch at night under pressure and immediately assess whether it is worth actually lifting and taking with you back to the West or not if you got it right then the rewards could be fantastic and we had rooms filled full of paper trash piecing together entire intelligence signals intelligence electronic intelligence technical intelligence human intelligence organizational intelligence all from trash it was well it was wonderful is brilliant I loved it but it was so scary sometimes that I'm still dreaming about it for more than 30 years confidential information plucked from the trash would help fuel the Cold War [Music] Berlin is a city that is risen from the rubble of war now it runs one of the most efficient waste management systems in the world and how it came to be has everything to do with the Berlin Wall built by an army of Soviet workers a hundred and sixty kilometers of solid concrete slabs three meters high one meter thick complete with watchtowers barbed wire and heavily armed guards the wall surrounded the city leaving West Berliners with no place to dump their trash after 1961 when the wall was built West Berlin was isolated was surrounded by a wall had no landfills and had a big problem about what are we going to do with our waste the city was a stinking mess the wall blocked access to traditional city dumps and garbage piled up on the streets but below ground in the sewers an even bigger problem was brewing Berlin sewer system was designed by James Hall Brecht the father of modern sewage engineering since Berlin was flat hole Brecht had to build a sewer system that didn't require gravity he created network of pressurized tunnels and underground vaults to flush the city's sewage to a state-of-the-art water treatment facility günther clay was an engineer in Berlin sewers for nearly 40 years he's seen sewage from both sides of the wall design outsides in his time hold rec didn't plan drainage areas according to political borders science rather his borders were those of topographical relations as the wall was being built above ground below the sewers ran freely in every direction and for East Berliners who was a road to freedom Ulrich Pfeiffer was one of them he slipped Adamas it was 50 years ago I lived in East Berlin August in August 1961 I wanted very much to escape to West Berlin that's where my mother and sister went - Resta at first Alaric planned to jump the fence but Soviet troops were everywhere rwandan Zoot leash this one woke at Aulis rules of barbed wire had been laying out a bit south of the Brandenburg Gate where we were we thought about jumping over it but there were so many soldiers with Kalashnikovs we were too scared Sangha Dawa this view it was a couple of weeks before we found another opportunity I was a Mista I met a group of five young people who planned to flee to West Berlin through the sewers as soviets worked on the berlin wall above ground our Rick and his friends plunged into the sewers below a Terry stop thought it was of course pitch black when we climbed down into the sewers but we broke tower way forward we stumbled forward slowly it was about six or seven hundred metres to the border Maas banks we were terrified but our motivation was so great we kept going then to our horror there was a steel grate in the sewer right at the border [Music] but then with desperate fingers groping in the dark he found a way out a la Blanca fortunately there was a slight gap of maybe 30 centimeters between the grate and the ground below which meant we could slide past if we lay down in the filthy sewage Austin we were scared it was a dark slimy stinky sewer we crawled our way forward with our hands and the feces following the sewer from left to right but our motivation to reach the West was so great that we overcame our fear and disgust did eat what wouldn't not past the great they could see light at the end of the tunnel once we saw the open manhole above us we climbed upwards and then stood on the street it was such an incredible feeling of joy to be in West Berlin it has been half a lifetime off but I remember it as well as if it was yesterday one of the most important days of my life photography business Alric was lucky by November 1961 the Soviets had sealed all 41 of the cross-border underground sewers and although the grates were designed to let the sewage go through they often caused blockages and overflows the raw sewage spilling onto the streets on both sides of the wall forced the East and the West to talk trash these were the first negotiations between the two sides since the start of the Cold War both sides agreed to manage the sewers together and West Berlin was allowed access to East Berlin city dumps Oh Stu and fists the result was a bond between east and west for the employees of the operation on both sides had to work together with the certain respect [Music] trash forced ideology aside and paved the way for peace then on November 9th 1989 the wall which had come to symbolize the Cold War divided was trashed [Applause] brilliant historian dr. Ronnie Heidenreich it was an unbelievable huge amount of work to destruct the Berlin Wall there were more than 180 kilometers of concrete wall around West Berlin consisting of post border wall in the inner wall the closed up to border strip from the East Berlin hinterland 60 kilometers barbed wire fence 6,000 tons of scrap metal 300,000 tons of rubble Berliners had to deal with yet another massive pile of war trash and they innovated once again the ruble was used for the construction of roads or parking lots and so on so it was shred into small pieces and used for such purposes so and there are a few streets in the lane for example the new street between the Brandenburg Gate and to put some of flats which is set to be constructed on the rubble of the Berlin Wall what would have ended up in landfills in most cities became the foundation for a new Plaza in the avant-garde city of Berlin as you can find remains of the Berlin Wall host sections like this one on all continents today in more than 40 countries when the wall came down Berlin rejoiced and also paid homage to those who died trying to cross it this memorial is called the window of remembrance there are pictures names and the dates of people who were killed escaping over the Berlin wall 126 people who died between 1961 and 1989 [Music] today Berlin is booming but the city has a complicated relationship with trash pummeled by war cut in half and walled in Berliners were made acutely aware of just how quickly a city can drown in its own waste for the city sewers could not be divided by politics or ideology burden as one city has one wastewater system - cat litter for the sewage and the garbage and therefore they needed to cooperate and he needed to communicate over political franchise that was a necessity to maintain service and also to self problems and solve the problem they did Berlin sewage system is once again one of the most sophisticated in the world the building of us of Achieva is one of the biggest wastewater provider in Europe Berlin's vast sewers could stretch all the way from Berlin to Los Angeles wastewater from homes flows by gravity to the sewer system but because Berlin is so flat drainage is a serious problem so Berlin has developed a unique flushing system to keep the sewage flowing Wolfgang Kruger has worked cleaning Berlin sewers for 25 years today he's clearing a clog from a storm sewer he used to have to get down and dirty with the sewage but now high-tech super pressurized trucks do the flushing for him Giusti technique technology has made work easier for us we no longer have to come directly in contact with wastewater the combined high-pressure flush and suction system is complicated and expensive but it works these are some of em fat soaked we have to do this with the vehicle that has a high pressure flushing unit with water recycling the sludge is sucked up through manholes on the street the wastewater is then filtered and recycled back to flush the system again state-of-the-art robotic inspectors with mounted cameras are snaked down to monitor the work the information is digitally recorded to evaluate problems with 115 bars of pressure the remaining sewage is flushed to the next pumping station and from there to the sewage treatment plant for four months one says yon 25 years ago the technology looked very different we didn't even have one truck like this though we needed to bio the Berlin is once again a benchmark for its sewage systems but even as the city rebuilds and modernizes it's war addled past continues to haunt progress in the deadliest of ways unexploded bombs from World War two are still lurking below the surface [Music] Tobias heintzman leads a team of bomb hunters as a mindfuck bhai my department is responsible for hazard assessment and for the evaluation and identification of weapons occurrence here in Berlin welcome here in Berlin Berlin is sitting on top of thousands of unexploded allied bombs d'etat and even alia the numbers we have from the Allies state that approximately four hundred and forty thousand tons of ammunition were dropped here on Berlin [Music] you know the dungeons we estimate that there are over 3000 unexploded bombs here so got the title isn't bin Kangin first Heinzmann identifies volatile areas using classified aerial photographs left after the war on these aerial photos we can see where exactly Berlin was bombed and where we can expect there to be an increased risk of bombs to be found then the team hits the dirt armed with metal detectors designed to find bombs as deep as five metres below the surface typically there are between 3 to 12 bombs a year where we can say the bombs are bigger than 50 kilograms and wait here you see trash and garbage that we've recovered from the trench within the garbage we also find some military waste this is a bayonet when a bomb is found the team works quickly with the police to defuse it for that the police have specially trained technicians it's still a very dangerous job to defuse a bomb but it's absolutely necessary to eliminate the risk dangerous is an understatement as bombs age they become unstable in June 2010 nine of Heinzmann x' colleagues accidentally tripped a 2,000 pound arial mind the explosion killed three men and seriously injured the rest there are still thousands of bombs yet to be found and with any luck diffused what took the Allies only a few years to drop may take Berliners a hundred years to clean up [Applause] and Berlin is still haunted by even more disturbing trash from the past 35 kilometers north of the city is one of the Third Reich's most notorious sites the saxon house and concentration camp some 35,000 men women and children died here jews Polish and Dutch civilians and Soviet prisoners of war they worked as slaves to recycle fabric and leather for the German military historian Horst sufferance explains some 250 prisoners had to open the stitches of these leather things to separate the different raw materials leather metal and Falcon eyes drummer little was known about what life was like inside the camp until 2006 when archaeology students from Humboldt University in Berlin hit pay dirt in the form of trash we found a large garbage pit really quite a large spit some 5 meter 50 by 30 meters they began to excavate the prison dump and unearth more than 5,000 kilos of concentration camp trash all the objects you can find have their own history but it's difficult to interpret them to find the history which is hidden in these objects some of the objects for example we found names of former prisoners and our researchers were able to find the families to find more information about their lives about what happened to them here Horst and his team examined each object for clues about who left them and what life was like in the camp here they find a faded address on a piece of luggage and this address leads you to a house in Vienna and our researchers found out that Jewish people were collected in this house before deportation to Auschwitz and their belongings the suitcase was transported here to sachsen housing to be recycled so here you have the story of the extermination and exploitation of the Jewish people [Music] in these bellowing of the deported Jewish people they found photographs or passports pictures of children prisoners in the camp were starving they marked their names on food so they could ration it to survive this was one of these small sugar boxes from the Soviet camp here you can see a engraving on the backside difficult to read but I think it means stole which is a German name prisoners weren't the only ones who dumped their trash in the pit it's filled with porcelain used by the German army and also by the SS you don't only find relics used by the prisoners but also objects from the perpetrators with war trash littered throughout their city Berliners have had to confront the dilemma of what to preserve and what to let go architectural theorist Werner sueing is at one of the most controversial sites in all of Berlin we are standing here on a lawn which is not suburbia but it's the center of Berlin so we are standing in the basement of the historic Palace of Berlin nowhere else in the city is this conflict between saving and destroying more embodied than here the former site of the statue loss the opulent palace was the resident of the German monarchy from 1701 to 1918 later Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party occupied the palace but neglected it then in February 1945 the spatula was hit by a light bombs [Music] but it was partly destroyed in the Second World War but only partly so it could have been rebuilt relatively easily but the communist government decided to tear it down despite protests from art historians in West Germany the Soviets loaded the palace with dynamite and demolished it after World War two preservation was fervently debated in Berlin it's a particularly German dilemma save painful relics as reminders of their war Lydon past or destroy them ever since the Second World War there is a long process of destruction so it's very important to know that this sort of ruinous atmosphere of the city is part of the post-war history of Berlin in 1964 communists built their state Parliament on the ruins of the historic German palace but at the end of the Cold War Berliners faced the dilemma again destroy the building or keep it as a memorial [Music] the government ordered the building destroyed Berlin has managed to rebuild itself from the ashes of war into a world leader of waste management they recycle almost everything have eliminated landfills and are close to launching a trash system that runs on the very trash it collects [Music] yet after each conflict Berliners faced painful dilemmas about how to handle the reminders of war to this day many bullet-riddled walls are preserved checkpoint charlie the infamous crossing point of the berlin wall still stands the Holocaust Memorial was built to honor Europe's murdered Jews and for now this field remains empty architectural theorist Werner sueing believes it should stay that way the symbolic notion and the symbolic quality of this location indeed is the series of destructions the Communists try to get rid of the imperial past and so we destruct the palace the unified germany tries to get rid of the communist past and in the same process we're permanently thinking of healing history we permanently destroy the memory of history but the palace is slated to be rebuilt in Berlin the challenge is to figure out how to remove the trash without dishonouring or forgetting the past so I think in Berlin it is very important that we keep places that remind us of the erratic history of of the city of the Second World War of the bombing elsewhere in Berlin artists from the avant-garde movement are starting to reclaim their city by turning trash into art the place we are in is a place of trash culture at the same time it's a cultural hub it's the place of creative industry to be sure it's a place of working with trash in a way that finally leads to the fact that trash no longer is trash the work with trash leads to the end of trash [Music] and in the former Demilitarized Zone of the Berlin Wall artists and activists are also transforming war trash to build a better life it's what squatted in 91 and it was part of the former inner berlin border so it was a complete wasteland and then this whole gardening story began with people like putting lots of energy into building this place turning it into what it is now the squatters of Lemieux have worked to bring this dead strip along the Berlin Wall back to life they compost all their food use an outhouse and get their energy from solar power and wind but first they had to overcome their biggest challenge the biggest thing is actually recycling the ground I mean was like a complete dead space the squatters took a toxic wasteland that nobody wanted and gave it life then when this play sort of developed this strong ecological focus people said that's something we want to keep up so I mean now we have different options we can have water we can have electricity no mule is a unique community united by trash trying to invent a new sustainable way of living to rebuild after troubled times first of all this place was about dividing people and now it's about getting people together as generations of Berliners have before them the community of low mule has forged a new beginning from the trashed Berlin Wall and the ruins of war [Music] all across Berlin the wounds of history are still visible in its trash yet Berlin has shown that even a city with such a dark and troubling past can take responsibility for its own trash and become a model for the rest of the world [Music]

Channel: hazards and catastrophes

Views: 235,672

Rating: 4.636137 out of 5

Keywords: Trashopolis full documentaries, Trashopolis documentary, Trashopolis earth documentary, Trashopolis Berlin, Trashopolis The Eternal City, Trashopolis Berlin Germany, Trashopolis Germany, Trashopolis, Trashopolis Documentary, Trashopolis Full Episode, Trashopolis Season 1, Trashopolis Berlin Documentary, Trashopolis Berlin History, Trashopolis Berlin Trash Documentary, Trashopolis Clean Berlin, Trash Documentary, Trashopolis Getting Rid of Trash, Trashopolis German Culture

Id: tuEl_vZcMLM

Length: 45min 40sec (2740 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 23 2018