Sweden imported garbage to feed its incinerators

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.

Imported burnable waste from neighbors, charging them a fee to take it, and burned it in existing plants — getting paid for the input and for the energy it produced.

Recycling cut domestic waste, leaving incinerators underused and costly to idle.

Norway had excess waste and higher disposal costs, making export to Sweden cheaper.

Import fees plus energy sales created two revenue streams from the same burn.

Proximity kept transport costs low enough to make the import fee profitable.

When fixed capacity outlives its local input, sell the capacity as a service to whoever has the input, instead of shrinking around the shortfall.

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.