In Germany, garbage is considered a serious issue. There are various levels and ways of mandatory recycling that need to be implemented by everyone, including private households. For example, depending on the city, paper, "Gelber Sack", organic material, and everything else besides special disposables like for example batteries must be seperated, and compliance may be checked, and fines may be handed out in case of violation. Some people moving to Germany are surprised about how serious it is.

This explains why the garbage was checked, and why it was possible to track down the source.

United Nations document on German waste management.

http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/dsd_aofw_ni/ni_pdfs/NationalReport...

It's actually refreshing to know this is happening somewhere, thanks for sharing.

About half of the recyclable garbage is still burned along with the regular garbage, because it burns better.

Profit is, after all, more important than the environment. The garbage companies in Germany make somewhere between 50 and 100 billion per year.

The garbage companies are burning that stuff because nobody wants to buy it from them. Because often making something by way of recycling uses more resources than the alternative.

This is pretty standard in Western Europe, it's about the same in Belgium, the Netherlands and France at least

The same here in Sweden too.

Radioactive material messes up certain types of fire detectors, and more advanced detectors detects also when they go outside their working parameters.

A plausible explanation would be that the garbage made some fire detectors in a power plant's loading bay to go offline.

Apparently garbage is really routinely checked for trace contamination of radioactivity.