Finding Gold in Your Trash; This is a tale of two dumps. What we throw away is worth riches. All that it takes is a nose for opportunity.

Byline: William Underhill (With Stefan Theil in Berlin and Toula Vlahou in Athens)

Only the scavenging seagulls love Ano Liossia. By some reckoning, the mountainous heap of unsorted trash in the Athens suburbs ranks as Europe's largest rubbish dump, covering some 101 hectares. It's toxic, smelly, bug infested and, quite literally, overflowing. Not for the first time, tourists find a rich whiff of more than just history in the shadow of the Acropolis. In Greece, garbage is as much a feature of the landscape as olive groves and ruins.

The travails of Ano Liossia have lately been headlined across Europe as the worst of a widely shared problem. But it doesn't have to be this way. Just head north to ecosensitive Germany, where the ethos of dutiful citizenship extends to one's rubbish. There, dumping in the Grecian manner has been outlawed. Most landfill sites have been shut; those that remain accept only the trickiest materials that defy recycling. And through a mastery of modern alchemy, big business is turning trash into treasure. Raw waste is now powering a [euro]50 billion trash industry that's one of the fastest-growing sectors of the German economy. Hard to believe? Visit a state-of-the-art plant outside Berlin, where an army of robotized sorters and optic sensors sift through 100,000 tons of junk that Berlin's 3.5 million inhabitants dispose of annually. The few leftovers are pressed into pellets--for use as an industrial-energy source.

One continent, two garbage cultures. Despite the efforts of the European Union to standardize recycling, habits vary by latitude and outlook--giving rise to predictable north-versus-south cultural cliches. Super-efficient Germans, Danes and Belgians recycle or incinerate more than 80 percent of their household trash. Southerners dump most of it in (or on) the ground. Sighs Athens' Environment Minister George Souflias: "Citizens must acquire an environmental conscience, but it's been difficult, initially, to teach Greeks such things."

The southerners are leaving money at the dump. Improved technology and high prices for raw materials have transformed recycling into a booming business worth more than [euro]100 billion annually. Environmentalists say every 10,000 tons that reaches a recycling plant adds 250 jobs in an industry that, in Germany, already employs 60,000. "A few years ago this was considered a sleepy, boring industry," says Peter Kurth, CFO of Alba, the company responsible for that high-tech plant in Berlin. "Today it's one of the most dynamic, with private-equity funds fighting to get in." Alba has doubled its revenues to [euro]750 million since 2004. Next, it plans to build a new plant to convert ...