Germany
Birgit Loff
Berlin is awash in dog doo, said Birgit Loff in the Frankfurter Rundschau. “No place escapes decoration: the kids’ sandbox, the lawns in the parks, even your front steps.” It’s gotten so bad that Berliners now admit that they’ve stopped wearing shoes with treads. “It’s too disgusting to pick the stuff out.” Fining negligent dog owners for failing to dispose of waste doesn’t work; it’s simply too difficult to catch them—or rather their dogs—in the act. And city officials have already added all the street cleaners and sanitation workers they can afford. So now they’ve hired Germany’s dog-poop specialists, a firm called City & Dog, to install plastic-bag dispensers all over town. The company sends out statisticians to count the little piles in various neighborhoods and determine which areas need the most attention. On particularly poop-prone streets, workers go person to person, accosting anyone with a dog in tow and pressing several bags upon them. It’ll be some time before we see a difference, though. One of the first facts City & Dog established was that Berlin’s dogs “produce 55 tons of poop every single day.”
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Fannie Flagg’s 6 favorite books that sparked her imaginationFeature The author recommends works by Johanna Spyri, John Steinbeck, and more
-
Google: A monopoly past its prime?Feature Google’s antitrust case ends with a slap on the wrist as courts struggle to keep up with the tech industry’s rapid changes
-
Patrick Hemingway: The Hemingway son who tended to his father’s legacyFeature He was comfortable in the shadow of his famous father, Ernest Hemingway
