Karl Ihmels laughs at the idea that he is an environmental heretic. But like Martin Luther more than 500 years ago, he is challenging the power of an entrenched monopoly - in this case, the German waste management system - and will face his day in court next month. Dr Ihmels, a softly-spoken but determined Social Democrat, is the elected Landrat - local authority head - of LahnDill, a county with a population of 270,000, some 100 km north of Frankfurt. And what he wants to do is to take his county, one of 450 in Germany, out of the Duales regime.
Duales System Deutschland (DSD) is a really big player. It oversees the collection and recycling of all forms of packaging waste, raking in an annual turnover of €2 billion (£1.575 billion). But Dr Ihmels sees it as a cosy cartel, run by a board of directors dominated by waste contractors.
It is also incredibly expensive. Collecting and processing pre-sorted recyclables from every household in Germany costs €750 (£590) per tonne. And even at that price, critics maintain that DSD only manages to recover 55 per cent of the total volume of packaging waste.
Dr Ihmels is convinced there is a better way. For five years, as head of Lahn-Dill's waste management authority, he worked with a locally-based company, called Herhof, on the composting of organic waste. One thing led to another and soon they had a revolution on their hands.
What Herhof developed was a "closed loop" recycling system. Municipal waste is taken in, shredded and then dried out for six days in large composting boxes. Afterwards, using a variety of technological devices, all of the recyclables - metals, glass, plastic and minerals - are recovered.
Some of these materials, especially aluminium and other non-ferrous metals, are valuable and their sale helps to reduce the overall treatment costs to €90 euros (£71 per tonne) - or about 12 per cent of the DSD figure. "It's simple, cheap and environmentally friendly," says Dr Ihmels.
The residue, amounting to some 50 per cent of the original waste volume, is called Trockenstabilat (Dry Stabilate), which has a calorific value equivalent to lignite and can be used as a fuel for cement kilns and power plants. And because it is largely inert, emissions are not problematic.
In one of the Herhof plants, a small incinerator fed by this "refuse-derived fuel" (RDF) provides all of its power needs. Water extracted from the waste is biologically treated, filtered and re-used in the plant's cooling system, with no discharge to the environment.
Exhaust air is also treated to comply with German emission standards. Most importantly, because used batteries are recovered during the separation process, the content of heavy metals in Herhof's RDF is reduced by 90 per cent.
No residue remains to be disposed of in lanfill sites; indeed, an old landfill site right beside one of the plants is now being broken down and its decomposed waste fed into the treatment system. Even slag from the burning of RDF is approved for re-use as a fill for road-building. Herhof's first Dry Stabilate plant at Asslar, in the state of Hesse, was commissioned in 1997 and is now treating 140,000 tonnes of municipal waste per annum. A second plant at Rennerod, in the Rhineland-Palatinate, with a capacity to treat 75,000 tonnes, opened last March.
Two more plants are under construction - one in Dresden and the second in Venice where, incidentally, it will replace an old municipal waste incinerator. Earlier this year, the company signed a contract to build its biggest plant in Trier, to treat and process 180,000 tonnes a year.
Founded by Hermann Hofman, a one-time bricklayer, Herhof started out in quarrying, readymix cement and road construction before getting involved in waste projects - first, by building landfills and, later, composting plants in Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Austria and Belgium.
The company, which employs 250 people, does all of its own research, design and construction. As project manager Eberhard Grueneklee explained, its experience with composting - plus a lot of lateral thinking - led to the development of Dry Stabilate and all that goes with it.
One might imagine that this trend-setting technology would have been welcomed with open arms. Far from it. In fact, it ran into fierce opposition from the waste industry, its army of consultants and the political establishment.
"The EU allocated €2.5 million for research, but we didn't get it because of resistance from the federal government - something that never happened before," Dr Ihmels recalls. The reason, he believes, is that the Herhof process challenged the entire German waste management system.
Strategies were adopted against him personally, he says. He gave an interview for a German television documentary on waste management, in which his contribution was edited to distort what he said; it was made by DSD's PR agency. The boss of the TV station eventually apologised.
"When we first introduced the Herhof system, DSD retaliated by making binding contracts to kill it," Dr Ihmels said. "Their attitude was: `Dr Ihmels may have the ideas, but we have the waste'. We complained to the EU Commission, saying there should have been a tender for the contracts."
Lahn-Dill's attempt to opt out of the DSD regime has been strongly resisted; indeed, it is the central issue in next month's court case. "We suggested that if they would stop collecting separated waste in the county, we would give them valuable materials for free, but they said no."
The county has environmental credentials. It was the first in Germany with a separate collection for organic waste, inaugurated by Joska Fischer, then Environment Minister for Hesse and now Foreign Minister. "As a Green, he was fine until we stepped beyond the line," says Dr Ihmels.
What worries DSD and its political supporters is that, if the administrative court finds in Ihmels's favour, other German counties may follow Lahn-Dill's example and opt for the Herhof process, or something like it. And so, the laborious business of collecting recyclables door-to-door would collapse.
According to Dr Ihmels, the DSD regime is so absurd that a company manufacturing plastic yoghurt cups would actually make more money by scrapping a day's production and selling the granulated plastic to DSD, than it would make by manufacturing the plastic cups! He agrees that he is playing the role of "the boy who said the emperor is without any clothes". But he has no doubt that he is right. In any case, because of increasing urbanisation, smaller houses and apartments, "nobody has room to store five recycling bins in their kitchen".
He sees "no disadvantages, only advantages" in using the Herhof system and believes that, in the future, it will be possible to finance it from the sale of recovered materials. "It's more intelligent to take out contaminants in advance instead of burning them and then having to clean the air."