1

Dirty power: Sweden wants your garbage for energy

Trash is a fast-growing import in the

Scandinavian country, which turns it into heat for

people's homes March 27, 2015 5:00AM ET

by Elisabeth Braw @elisabethbraw

2

A garbage dump in Göteborg, Sweden.Martin Almqvist / Johnér Images / Corbis

Every day, some 300 trucks arrive at a plant

outside the city of Göteborg on the west coast of

Sweden. They carry garbage, but they are not here

to dump the cargo. Instead, they deliver it to the

plant’s special ovens, which burn it, providing heat

to thousands of local homes.

“The only fuel we use is waste,” says Christian

Löwhagen, spokesman for Renova, the local

3

government-owned energy company operating the

plant. “It provides one-third of heat for households

in this region.” Across Sweden, 950,000 homes are

heated by trash; this lowly resource also provides

electricity for 260,000 homes across the country,

according to statistics from Avfall Sverige,

Sweden’s national waste-management association.

Indeed, with Swedes recycling almost half (47

percent) of their waste and using 52 percent to

generate heat, less than 1 percent of garbage now

ends up in the dump. “Sweden has the world’s best

network of district heating plants” — essentially

large ovens that use a variety of fuels to generate

heat, which is then transported to consumers’

homes through a network of underground pipes —

“and they’re well-suited for use of garbage,” says

Adis Dzebo, an energy expert at the Stockholm

Environment Institute. “By contrast, in many other

countries the heat and electricity infrastructure is

based on gas or other fossil fuels, so it’s not

4

economical to start building plants that utilize

garbage.”

Here’s the problem: the Swedes — as well as the

Germans, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians —

have become so good at recycling that there’s no

longer enough garbage to meet the heating plants’

needs. Sweden now has to import the trash that

most other countries are trying to dispose of, some

800,000 tons in 2014, up from 550,000 tons in

2010, according to Avfall Sverige.

Last year, Renova brought in 100,000 tons of

foreign garbage, mostly from Britain, in addition to

the 435,000 tons supplied by Swedish

municipalities. In Stockholm, energy provider

Fortum also imports garbage, and in the southern

city of Malmö, the Sysav energy company brought

in 135,000 tons of waste from Norway and Britain

last year, according to the company’s

5

communications director, Gunilla Carlsson. That’s

an almost 100 percent leap from the year before.

“We try to stay up-to-date on where well-sorted

garbage is available,” says Löwhagen. “We only

use waste where all recyclable bits have been

taken out. In Europe, enormous amounts of

garbage are put in landfill, so we’re doing other

countries a favor by taking care of it for them.” In

order to minimize cost and environmental impact,

companies try to get a cheap ride for their garbage

on ships coming to Sweden that would otherwise

have empty holds.

You wouldn’t believe how many emails we

get every week from people offering us

garbage.

Weine Wiqvist CEO of Sweden’s waste-management association

6

It’s not that Swedish decision-makers foresaw the

need to safely dispose of garbage when they

started building a countrywide network of district

heating plants a generation ago, but it turned out to

be a fortuitous move when public concern over

trash in landfills prompted the country to rethink its

garbage-disposal policies. Today putting waste on

the trash heap is banned, which means that

municipalities have to sort, recycle and, yes, burn,

their residents’ garbage. As a result, waste now

constitutes 19 percent of the fuel used by district-

heating plants, which heat half of Sweden’s

households and also use biomass such as leftover

tree branches from the logging industry. That

makes Sweden the world leader in energy

generated from garbage; it is followed by, in order,

the Czech Republic, Denmark, Norway and

Finland.

Using garbage for energy neatly solves the issue of

excessive reliance on landfills while at the same

7

time helping address residents’ energy and heating

needs. And as Sysav, Renova and district-heating

operators are owned by the cities they serve, they

have an obligation to use waste. Not that it’s a

heavy burden: The energy companies get the

resource for free and sell the resulting heat and

electricity. Measured by the volume of garbage

used to produce energy, the United States — not

surprisingly, given its much larger population —

tops the list, with 29 million tons. Still, that’s just 12

percent of the waste generated by Americans.

This is how the waste-to-energy process works:

After recyclable content has been removed, the

garbage is placed in incinerators that produce heat

or energy, which is then transported to nearby

homes. From the ashes, small pieces of metal,

which do not burn, are separated and recycled,

while those of porcelain and tile are sifted to extract

gravel, which is used in road construction. The

remaining one percent goes into landfills. And

8

though garbage-infused smoke sounds highly

poisonous, thanks to electric filters that give the

particles a negative electric charge, in Sweden the

smoke is almost entirely nontoxic carbon dioxide

and water, which are cleaned again before release.

“I know that district heating means they burn

garbage, but it’s not something I pay any attention

to,” says Göteborg resident Karin Fjellander. “The

thing about district heating is that it’s supposed to

be green, so if the smoke was poisonous I don’t

think they’d keep doing it.”

Because waste in landfills generates methane, a

concentrated form of CO2, the Swedish municipal

association estimates that every ton of imported

garbage — which would otherwise have been

decomposing in landfills — saves 1,100 pounds of

CO2 equivalent. Even if ships were to travel

specifically to deliver this garbage, the trade would

still end up a net positive for the environment.

9

“You wouldn’t believe how many emails we get

every week from people offering us garbage,” says

Weine Wiqvist, CEO of Avfall Sverige.

For now, Sweden imports its trash mostly from

Britain and Norway. According to Löwhagen, “But

since our trading partners pay us to dispose of their

garbage, we prefer to say that we’re exporting a

service” — waste disposal. Either way, Sweden’s

garbage needs are skyrocketing: According to

Avfall Sverige, the country will import 1.5 million

tons of waste this year and 2.3 million tons in 2020.

But with recycling rates increasing, the European

Union has advised its member states to start

building district-heating facilities that can also

produce energy. Delegations from various

countries including Poland, India and China now

regularly visit Sweden to learn about garbage heat

and energy.

10

Waste being unloaded in Göteborg for transport to the Renova plant.Courtesy Lars Ardarve via Renova

Austrians and Germans already recycle more than

60 percent of their garbage, while other Western

European countries are not far behind. Meanwhile,

the EU has commanded every member state to

reach 50 percent by 2020. In the United States, 34

percent of trash is now recycled, up from 10

percent in 2000, according to the Environmental

Protection Agency. “From a climate perspective, it’s

better to burn garbage for heat and energy than

11

putting it in landfill,” notes Dzebo. “But if everyone

begins to use garbage for energy, there won’t be

enough of it.”

A most unusual dilemma, then, compounded by the

fact that garbage is so voluminous and prone to

smelliness that transporting it from the other side of

the globe would be expensive and impractical. “The

Netherlands imports some from Italy, but in

contrast to oil and gas, it’s not a good you can ship

around the globe,” says Wiqvist. Still, Löwhagen

and his colleagues hope that Sweden’s pioneer

status will help it keep ahead of the pack.

Developing countries, for their part, may get access

to funding from the United Nations-affiliated Green

Climate Fund should they decide to invest in

waste-to-energy plants. “The Green Climate Fund

is currently developing its investment framework,

and one of the issues the members are discussing

is whether waste-to-energy should receive climate

funding as a renewable energy source,” explains

12

Dzebo. “But it’s important that this model goes

hand in hand with efficient sorting of the garbage,

including the removal of recyclable and toxic

material.” Developing countries will, in other words,

have to show the Green Climate Fund that they

don’t just plan to burn their waste wholesale but are

also making serious efforts to reduce it.

Winqvist says he is not concerned about

consumers’ increasingly diligent recycling, even

though it reduces the volume of waste available for

energy production. “After a couple of recycling

rounds, paper can’t be reused again, so you have

to burn it,” he explains. “And putting garbage in

landfill will always be cheaper than burning it. Even

with people recycling more, there’s going to be

plenty of waste for heating and energy plants.”