Green Dot Programme means recycling of industrial polluted water began in which country?

Question

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Correct — option (2), Germany. The Green Dot, in German Der Grüne Punkt, was introduced in Germany in 1990 by Der Grüne Punkt - Duales System Deutschland GmbH, just before the German Packaging Ordinance took effect, and Germany is therefore the country in which the programme began. It is the financing symbol of what has since become a European network of industry-funded recovery systems: a manufacturer who prints the mark on a package has paid a licence fee towards the cost of collecting, sorting and recycling that packaging, and the fee is set by the material and the weight. The scheme's importance is that it is the ancestor of extended producer responsibility as a working policy — the principle that the producer, and not the municipality or the taxpayer, carries the cost of dealing with a product once the consumer has finished with it. That principle now runs through India's own Plastic Waste Management Rules and E-Waste Rules. One point about the stem should be stated plainly. It describes the Green Dot as meaning the recycling of industrial polluted water, and that is not what the programme covers; the Green Dot is a packaging-waste scheme, and the mark says only that the producer pays into the take-back system, not even that the particular package can be recycled. The country in which the programme began is Germany on any account of it, so the misdescription in the stem does not affect the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) France did not originate the Green Dot. What makes the option plausible is that the mark is now used across much of Europe — it is described as the financing symbol of a European network of industry-funded packaging recovery systems, so a French consumer will see it on packaging exactly as a German one does. Use is not origin. The scheme was created in Germany in 1990 by Duales System Deutschland, immediately before the German Packaging Ordinance came into effect, and other European countries adopted the mark afterwards under licence. Whenever a question asks where a scheme began rather than where it operates, the answer is fixed by the founding date and the founding organisation, which here are both German.  (c) Ireland is one of the European countries in which the Green Dot mark can be seen on packaging, which is what makes it a usable distractor, but the scheme did not begin there. The Green Dot was introduced in Germany in 1990 by Der Grüne Punkt - Duales System Deutschland GmbH ahead of the German Packaging Ordinance, and it spread outward from that model. A candidate who has met the mark in a European context without knowing its history has no way to separate a participating country from the originating one, and that is exactly the gap the option is designed to exploit; the safeguard is to learn each environmental scheme with its country and its founding year attached.  (d) Norway is not the origin of the Green Dot either. It is a plausible-looking option because the Nordic countries are strongly associated with recycling and with deposit-return schemes for beverage containers, which are a different mechanism from the Green Dot's licence fee: a deposit scheme charges the consumer a refundable sum on the container, while the Green Dot charges the producer a fee for the packaging placed on the market. Both are forms of extended producer responsibility, but they work through different parties. The Green Dot itself was created in Germany in 1990, and it is the German scheme that gave the mark its name and its rules.

Concept: Extended producer responsibility makes the producer of a good responsible for its disposal, and the Green Dot is the earliest large-scale working example. Germany's Packaging Ordinance of the early 1990s obliged manufacturers and distributors to take back their packaging; rather than each firm running its own collection, industry set up a parallel or dual system, Duales System Deutschland, which collects and recycles on their behalf and is paid by licence fees. Printing the Green Dot on a package records that the fee has been paid. Two misreadings of the mark are common and both are worth avoiding: it does not mean that the package is recyclable, and it does not mean that the package is made of recycled material — it means only that the producer contributes to the recovery system. The idea has since been generalised. Across the European Union, packaging, batteries, vehicles and electrical goods are all governed by producer responsibility obligations, and India applies the same principle through the Plastic Waste Management Rules and the E-Waste (Management) Rules, which place collection targets on producers, importers and brand owners. The alternative instruments in the same family are deposit-refund schemes, take-back mandates and landfill taxes.

State PCS 2021 Q33 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q33 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer