#232 2012 · Swedish waste-to-energy sector (Avfall Sverige and municipal plants) · Waste management / energyreframe
Sweden recycled so well it ran out of its own garbage, so it started charging other countries to take theirs
the problem
A processing operation built for a certain volume of input finds its own supply drying up
background
Sweden built a national network of waste-to-energy incineration plants to turn household trash into electricity and district heating, on the assumption that a modern economy generates a predictable, growing stream of burnable waste — the same assumption every country's waste infrastructure is planned around. The plants represent large fixed capital investment: once built, an incinerator's economics depend on running near capacity, whether or not the local supply of trash keeps up.
Sweden's recycling and waste-sorting programs turned out to work too well: by the early 2010s only about 1% of Swedish household waste was going to landfill, versus roughly 38% across Europe on average, because so much material was being separated out for recycling or composting before it ever reached the incinerator. That left Sweden's waste-to-energy plants running below the volume of burnable trash they were built to process — an idle-capacity problem most countries' waste operators would never expect to have.
the move
Rather than let expensive incineration capacity sit underused, Swedish municipal waste operators began importing non-recyclable waste from neighboring countries, chiefly Norway, charging those countries a fee to take waste that was more expensive for them to burn or landfill domestically — because it was reportedly more economical for Norway to export the waste than incinerate it at home. Sweden gets paid twice: once by the exporting country for taking the waste, and again by keeping its own power and heating plants running near capacity.
the payoff
By 2012 Sweden was importing roughly 800,000 tonnes of waste a year, mostly from Norway, to keep its incinerators running near capacity — reporting since has described import volumes climbing well beyond that in the years after, though this case cites only the figure independently confirmed at the time. Al Jazeera reported the waste-to-energy program supplying power for a quarter of a million Swedish homes as of 2012.
what came after
Sweden's arrangement is now widely cited internationally as the go-to example of an economy converting a byproduct of its own environmental success (near-zero landfill use) into a paid service, though later reporting, including from The Local, has pushed back on how 'green' the model really is — incineration ash contains dioxins and heavy metals that Sweden ships back to Norway for landfilling, and critics argue importing burnable waste can undercut the exporting countries' own incentive to recycle it instead.
references
- [1]Sweden wants Norway's trash (and lots of it)Phys.org / AFP, 2012phys.org
- [2]Sweden imports trash to generate powerAl Jazeera, 2012aljazeera.com