ENTANGLED ECOLOGIES 151
southern Bavaria, which was somewhat ironic, as the state faced a bitter
confl ict over a nuclear reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf at the time.^9
Trash created another connection between ecosystems in East and
West. In order to obtain foreign currency, the GDR imported four to fi ve
million tons of waste from the FRG and West Berlin in the mid-1980s, in-
cluding more than half a million tons of hazardous waste. It also took on
municipal and hazardous waste from the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, and
Switzerland, and a Swiss company built a hazardous waste incineration
facility near Berlin. The fl ow of waste was eminently one-directional; in
fact, East German waste did not move much at all, as many GDR factories
embraced wildcat on-site disposal. The one asset of GDR waste manage-
ment was effi cient recycling of “secondary raw materials” in what was
called the SeRo-system, but that was entirely due to the country’s no-
torious shortage of raw materials.^10 The entanglement of West and East
German waste streams mattered beyond the German context. In negoti-
ations over what would become the Basel Convention on the Control of
Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, the
GDR and the FRG successfully lobbied for permission to make bilateral
waste agreements outside the treaty’s framework.^11
In a somewhat ironic twist of fate, West Germans were reunited with
their own waste in 1990. The GDR not only lacked orderly disposal prac-
tices, but also reliable information about the number of landfi lls. Initial
estimates listed about fi fty thousand sites, but this number had climbed
to more than eighty thousand landfi lls by 1997, and a quarter of these
sites did actually show signs of leakage.^12 Environmental restoration in
the former GDR was a technological and administrative megaproject, and
historian Günter Bayerl has argued that it can be “deemed a ‘success
story’ for the most part.”^13 However, the costs as well as the scientifi c and
technical challenges were huge—little wonder in a project with plenty
of unknowns. Sociologist Matthias Groß has shown how recultivation of
open-cast lignite coal mines required improvisation and experimentation
for problems such as the contamination of water with acids and heavy
metals, or the stability of embankments. A popular recreation area near
Leipzig, the Leipziger Neuseenland, is a result of recultivation.^14
But when it comes to environmental restoration, all eff orts pale in
comparison to the contaminated sites of the SDAG Wismut, a Soviet-Ger-
man corporation for uranium mining in Saxony and Thuringia. Uranium
mining was carefully kept under wraps in the GDR, which meant that
the full extent of the environmental damage came to light only after the
collapse of socialist rule. By the end of 2010, billions had been spent on
the restoration of 9,104 levees, the fi lling of 6.5 million cubic meters of
cavities, and the safe disposal of almost 190,000 tons of scrap metal and