Euro's trash is powering Sweden...

Coat of arms of the Naturvårdsverket (Swedish Environmental Protection Agency). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sweden’s waste-to-energy program converts household trash into energy, providing electricity and heating to hundreds of thousands of homes across the nation. But the program may be too successful; they’re now running out of homegrown trash to fuel the power plants. Host Bruce Gellerman spoke with Catarina Ostlund of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency about the country’s decision to import waste from its European neighbors to keep incinerators running.

 

GELLERMAN: It's Living on Earth, I'm Bruce Gellerman. When it comes to recycling, Sweden is sensationally successful. Just 4% of household waste in Sweden goes into landfills. The rest winds up either recycled or used as fuel in waste-to-energy power plants.
Burning the garbage in the incinerators generates 20 percent of Sweden’s district heating and provides electricity for a quarter of a million homes. The problem is, Sweden’s waste recycling program is too successful! Catarina Ostlund, is Senior Advisor for the Swedish EPA.
OSTLUND: We don’t have enough burnable waste within our own country so that’s why we import waste from other countries. We have more capacity than the production of waste in Sweden and that is usable for incineration.
GELLERMAN: You’ve got an enviable problem there! You don’t have enough trash!
OSTLUND: It’s not a problem- we can import some trash from the rest of Europe, because in the rest of Europe you landfill quite a lot of trash and I think they need us to take care of their trash.
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