How one German city’s decision to reward tourists for picking up litter is quietly rewriting the rules of responsible travel — and inspiring a global movement
Global (Tourism Reporter) — There is a particular kind of policy idea that sounds, at first hearing, almost too simple to be serious. Pay tourists to pick up litter. Give them free museum tickets for arriving by bicycle. Hand out restaurant vouchers to visitors who help clean a riverbank. Strip away the dense policy language and the sweeping sustainability frameworks, and what you are left with is a proposition that a child could understand: do something good for the city, and the city will do something good for you.
And yet, for all its apparent simplicity, this idea is fast becoming one of the most talked-about developments in global urban tourism. Berlin’s new BerlinPay scheme—launched in May 2026 as a pilot initiative under the city’s Water Tourism Theme Year—represents the latest, and arguably most significant, iteration of a model that began quietly in Copenhagen two years ago and has since spread its influence to over a hundred destinations worldwide.
What started as a localized Scandinavian experiment in nudging tourist behaviour has become something considerably larger: a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between cities and the visitors who descend upon them.
A City That Has Always Worn Its Edges Proudly
To understand why BerlinPay matters, it helps to understand Berlin. The German capital is a city that has never been precious about its appearance. Its identity has long been bound up in creative disorder—the peeling facades, the graffiti-covered walls, the parks that blur the line between bohemian and neglected. For many of its residents, a certain ambient scruffiness has always felt like part of the city’s character, a proud rejection of the manicured perfectionism that other European capitals project.
But there is a difference between character and crisis, and Berlin’s relationship with waste has, by any honest measure, crossed that line. The cost of removing illegally dumped waste in the city recently climbed to over 10.3 million euros annually. A single district—Neukölln—received a staggering 15,000 complaints relating to rubbish within a twelve-month period. Beyond the illegal dumping of furniture and old appliances that Berliners themselves are largely responsible for, smaller items like cigarette butts, food packaging, and plastic bottles accumulate in public spaces at a rate that the city’s cleaning service (BSR) perpetually struggles to keep pace with.
The political response, until recently, has been largely punitive. A strict new schedule of fines was enforced by the Senate at the end of 2025 to combat the issue: dropping a cigarette butt now carries a penalty of up to 250 euros, a massive jump from the previous 55-euro fine. In serious cases involving larger property violations, penalties can rise to 3,000 euros, while illegally dumped bulky waste attracts fines between 1,500 and 11,000 euros—skyrocketing to 15,000 euros for old electrical appliances or hazardous materials containing dangerous chemicals. More inspectors have been deployed, and enforcement has been stepped up in areas where littering has been most persistent.
All of this is sensible. None of it, by itself, is enough. And that is precisely where BerlinPay enters the conversation.
The Idea: Reward Rather Than Reprimand
BerlinPay—developed by visitBerlin, the city’s official tourism body, in cooperation with the Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Public Enterprises—operates on a principle that behavioral economists have long understood but public policy has been slow to fully embrace: positive reinforcement works. Not as a total replacement for sanctions, but alongside them. The carrot and the stick, when deployed together, are considerably more effective than either one alone.
The mechanics of the program are deliberately uncomplicated. Visitors and residents who participate in qualifying activities—such as picking up litter, assisting with waterfront cleanups, planting or watering trees, arriving at a venue by bicycle, or supporting local social projects—receive tangible rewards in return. These benefits range from canoe tours and free museum tickets to restaurant discounts and leisure activities on the water. The Hosek Contemporary art gallery is among the early participating venues, inviting visitors who arrive via sustainable transport to free concerts. Similarly, the Humboldt Forum is offering guided tours and exclusive merchandise to guests who visit its On Water exhibition.
Deputy Mayor Franziska Giffey articulated the city’s ambition plainly. Water tourism in Berlin, she noted, is booming and represents a significant economic factor—but it also leaves an environmental footprint. The initiative, she said, invites Berliners and their guests to experience the city in a far more mindful way. Sabine Wendt, Chief Executive of visitBerlin, was equally direct: the principle is simple—those who do something good for Berlin will get to experience Berlin at its very best in return.
What the city is betting on is something much larger than a clean riverbank. It is wagering on a virtuous circle: visitors who are invited to contribute feel a deeper connection to a place; people who feel connected to a place treat it with greater respect; and places treated with greater respect become vastly more appealing to future visitors. The logic is elegant, and the evidence from trailblazers elsewhere suggests it is far more than theoretical.
The Spree at the Centre of It All
The pilot’s initial focus on Berlin’s waterways is not accidental. The Spree, which winds through the heart of the city, has become both a symbol of Berlin’s recreational potential and a barometer of its environmental challenges. As temperatures rise and the city’s appetite for outdoor leisure grows, the river and its surrounding banks have drawn ever-larger numbers of visitors — kayakers, paddleboarders, wild swimmers, picnickers — and with them, the inevitable accumulation of litter and waste that high footfall brings.
The Green Kayak initiative, which has already been operating in partnership with Backstagetourism, offers a glimpse of what BerlinPay is attempting to scale. The concept — borrowing a kayak in exchange for collecting a bag of rubbish from the water — is the kind of elegant simplicity that travels well. It transforms what might otherwise be a passive leisure activity into a small act of civic contribution. It makes the tourist a participant rather than a passenger.
Berlin is ringed by lakes and waterways that draw millions of visitors each summer, and the extension of BerlinPay’s logic to these spaces — rewarding responsible behaviour on the water and around it — represents an opportunity to address one of the city’s most persistent environmental challenges through engagement rather than enforcement alone.
Copenhagen’s Blueprint: From Pilot to Movement
BerlinPay did not emerge from a vacuum. Its intellectual DNA is traceable, directly and openly, to Copenhagen’s CopenPay scheme—a program that, when it launched in the summer of 2024, appeared to many observers as a charming local initiative with limited wider relevance. Within months, however, it became clear that something far more significant had occurred.
CopenPay’s premise was identical in spirit to what Berlin is now attempting: reward visitors for making sustainable choices. Actions like cycling, using public transport, participating in canal cleanups, or attending biodiversity workshops each qualified for a reward, ranging from free museum access and kayak rentals to meals and guided tours. In its initial four-week pilot season, bike rentals soared by 29%, tons of waste were successfully removed from public spaces, and an overwhelming 98% of participants stated they would recommend the program to others.
By 2025, CopenPay had expanded to nearly four times its original size, enlisting 100 participating local attractions for a nine-week summer program running from June to August. Overall participation skyrocketed, growing from 5,000 tourists in 2024 to 25,000 in 2025. More striking still, 70% of participants reported that the experience actively prompted them to adopt sustainable habits in their daily lives back home. A tourism initiative had, quietly, evolved into a highly effective behavioral change intervention extending well beyond Denmark’s borders.
The global response was extraordinary. More than 100 destinations worldwide contacted Wonderful Copenhagen, the city’s tourism board, seeking guidance on replicating the model. Cities across Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, and beyond began developing their own iterations. What had begun as a localized pilot in a single Scandinavian capital had, in the space of just two years, ignited a global movement.
What Incentivised Tourism Is Really About
It would be a mistake to read BerlinPay, or CopenPay before it, purely as a waste management initiative with a good marketing angle. What these programmes represent is something considerably more profound: a fundamental shift in the way cities conceptualise their relationship with tourists.
For most of the history of modern tourism, visitors have been understood essentially as consumers. They arrive, they spend, they leave. The destination’s job is to provide the experience; the tourist’s job is to pay for it. Environmental and social responsibility, in this model, is the city’s problem — to be managed through infrastructure, regulation, and enforcement.
The incentivised tourism model inverts this. It says to the visitor: you are not merely a customer here. You are a participant. Your presence has an impact, and you have the capacity to make that impact positive rather than negative. And if you choose to do so, the city will reward you — not symbolically, but concretely, with experiences and benefits that enhance your visit.
This is not mere sentiment. It reflects a genuine shift in what a growing segment of travellers actually want from their experiences. Research consistently shows that particularly among younger visitors, the desire to travel in ways that feel meaningful and responsible is not a niche preference but a mainstream aspiration. Programmes like BerlinPay do not create this desire; they meet it. They give tourists who already want to behave responsibly a structured, visible, rewarding way to do so.
The Complications Worth Acknowledging
No honest account of BerlinPay’s launch would be complete without acknowledging the scepticism it has attracted, some of it perfectly reasonable.
The most frequent objection is that the scale of tourist participation, however enthusiastic, is unlikely to make a material difference to a city that generates waste at Berlin’s volume. A visitor picking up a bag of litter on the Spree is a welcome gesture, but it is not a solution to the structural challenge of a city producing 13.1 million euros worth of illegally dumped waste every year. Critics who make this point are not wrong.
There is also a question of incentive architecture. The rewards need to be genuinely worth the effort, and visitBerlin has acknowledged that it is still working to secure partnerships that make the scheme compelling enough to drive meaningful participation. A free museum ticket for a visitor who was already planning to visit that museum is not quite the same thing as a reward that changes behaviour. Getting this calibration right is one of the practical challenges the pilot will need to address.
The initial reactions to BerlinPay within the city have been mixed, and that, too, is worth noting. Some residents are enthusiastic. Others are more sceptical — questioning whether the scheme addresses the right problem, or whether it risks giving tourists undue credit for tidying up a mess they did not wholly create.
These are fair observations. They do not invalidate the initiative. They do suggest that BerlinPay’s success will depend heavily on how the pilot is evaluated, refined, and scaled — and on whether the city is prepared to invest the sustained attention and partnership-building that a programme of this ambition genuinely requires.
A Model Whose Time Has Come
The broader picture, however, is one of momentum. The incentivised tourism model is no longer an experiment. It is a proven approach with a growing evidence base, a demonstrated capacity to change behaviour, and an ability to generate precisely the kind of positive visitor experience that destinations compete fiercely to deliver.
Berlin is not a city that has ever needed lessons in reinvention. Its capacity to absorb, adapt, and transform is woven into its identity. What BerlinPay represents is the application of that instinct to one of the most pressing challenges facing major urban destinations in the 2020s: how to welcome millions of visitors every year without being consumed by the consequences of their presence.
The answer BerlinPay offers is not a perfect one. No single initiative ever is. But it is a genuinely imaginative one — grounded in evidence, built on a foundation of respect for the visitor rather than suspicion of them, and aligned with the direction in which the most forward-thinking destinations in the world are already moving.
When a city decides that the best way to protect its public spaces is not to threaten visitors who damage them but to reward those who care for them, something important has shifted. Berlin has made that shift. The question now is not whether other cities will follow. It is how quickly.
BerlinPay was launched by visitBerlin and the Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Public Enterprises in May 2026 as part of Berlin’s Water Tourism Theme Year. The pilot runs until 14 June 2026.
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