In Germany, the idea of ecologically sustainable design goes back to the Bauhaus-school of the 1920s, which established the "form follows function"-principle and set the goal to aid social reform by creating standardized, simple forms for the mass-production of high-quality and affordable products. Since the 1980s there has been a lively public discussion of environmental topics and legislation in this field has accelerated. Environment-minded consumers have become a strong group and designers and producers have increasingly been developing environment-friendly products. The Kyoto-Protocol was ratified in 2002 and in the past few years there have been new laws concerning the recycling of plastic bottles and cans and, since 2006, also electronic equipment. In German supermarkets customers have to pay for paper and plastic bags, encouraging everybody to bring their own bags. In every market you will find stations to return plastic bottles and cans and receive a refund, these materials are collected in a separate recycling system instead of being thrown away. The recycling system is based on the principle that the producers of packaging have to pay for the waste disposal. They do so by paying a license fee for the “green dot” which then appears on the packaging and signals to the consumer that the item has to be thrown into a special waste bin for recyclable materials. The "green dot" was intro duced in the 1990s and today appears on almost all packaging. Recycling rates are very high, especially for glass packaging (82%), paper (60%), and aluminium (83%), and Germany takes on the leading position in Europe concerning the recycling of synthetic materials. Lena Maria Huttel, Goethe-institut Tokyo