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posted by on Saturday December 10 2016, @06:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the less-is-more dept.

Sweden is so good at recycling that, for several years, it has imported rubbish from other countries to keep its recycling plants going. Less than 1 per cent of Swedish household waste was sent to landfill last year or any year since 2011.

Well, it's not quite so idyllic as that (it sounds as if they're incinerating), but it's far, far ahead of the competition. As reported in The Independent (from a solidly British perspective, naturally) :

Why are we sending waste to Sweden? Their system is so far ahead because of a culture of looking after the environment. Sweden was one of the first countries to implement a heavy tax on fossil fuels in 1991 and now sources almost half its electricity from renewables.

[...] Over time, Sweden has implemented a cohesive national recycling policy so that even though private companies undertake most of the business of importing and burning waste, the energy goes into a national heating network to heat homes through the freezing Swedish winter. “That's a key reason that we have this district network, so we can make use of the heating from the waste plants. [...]”

So they don't actually recycle, but they barely need landfills, and “In the UK, each local authority has its own system, making it difficult for residents to be confident about what they can recycle and where.” Sounds like the U.S., dunnit?


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  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday December 10 2016, @11:34PM

    by Aiwendil (531) on Saturday December 10 2016, @11:34PM (#439828) Journal

    As people have pointed out the tempo of life here in sweden is quite laid back.

    However, in residental blocks (highrise and such) they tend to place the recycling bins near/at the parking lot. So if you just add a few more bins with liner bags in them the sorting will end up in your musclememory, and when something is full you just grab the liner bag on your way out of the appartment and chuck it on the way to your car and when you get home again you put in a new liner bag.

    Once you get the routine down it will cost you less than two minutes per month (one drawback however is that it can take weeks to fill up the kitchen-garbage bin, so one tends to get in the habit of chucking that once a week as well).

    The recycling of bottles/cans (the stuff you get a refund on) is a PITA however since it requires you to drag it to a grocery-store... and over here home delivery of food is getting common. (I can't wait for them to start adding bins for the refund-stuff as well - not worth the hassle for the refund [if I was that strapped for cash I would stop drinking sodas and refunds would be a moot point anyway] but it bothers me to not recycle).

    Btw - the only way for you to get paper to end up in a landfill here is to visit a recycling-centre and sort it wrong (it goes either in paper or burnable) - much easier to either send it to recycling (in the way to the car) or waste-incineration (kitchen/household-thrash - anything not sorted get incinerated)

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