Sweden has a dirty little secret. For decades, it has been dumping toxic waste in a hole on Langøya, a tiny island off the coast of Norway. That hole is now full. The company that runs it started looking for somewhere else where it could dispose of the toxins produced by Swedish incinerators. It zeroed in on Brevik, a little village south of the capital, Oslo. For more than a century, a local cement factory had been digging limestone beneath the town, creating 300km of tunnels. These could now be stuffed with the nasty stuff.
Since the 1990s, Langøya has been the final resting place for most of the toxic fly ash produced by burning household waste in Sweden. The island has capacity for 10 million cubic metres, but by 2022 it will start to overflow. NOAH, the company behind the landfill, looked at a hundred alternative sites across the country and narrowed it down to three, of which Brevik was the most attractive. NOAH imports a quarter of a million tonnes of fly ash annually from Swedish and Danish incinerators, mixing it with waste from other industries. The company reckoned that, once Langøya was full, the Brevik site could operate for 30 or 40 years.
The locals were not happy. From being an idyllic summer destination, Brevik would become known as a toxic rubbish dump. They cited expert opinion that the waste treatment plant nearby would handle dangerous gases and acid, just a few hundred metres from people’s homes. Moreover, simply disposing of the waste meant ignoring new technologies with the potential to clean up the fly ash and neutralise its toxicity altogether. NOAH countered that no other method made commercial or environmental sense. At the time this book went to print, the debate was still in full swing.
It is ironic that Norway’s toxic hot potato should have arisen from a Swedish environmental success. After it banned dumping waste in landfill in 2005, Sweden began to burn increasing amounts of garbage, both household and industrial, generating heat and power while slashing its greenhouse gas emissions. The process was so smooth and efficient that countries such as the UK paid to offload their waste onto Sweden, prompting awestruck speculation in foreign media that the country had ‘run out of rubbish’ and was forced to import it. In 2017, about a fifth of the rubbish consumed by Sweden’s 34 waste-to-energy plants came from abroad.
Incineration is no longer controversial in Sweden, because it is clean. After Swedish scientists in the 1980s studied the release of dioxins – dangerous mutagens and carcinogens – from municipal incinerators, strict requirements were introduced for cleaning up the process. The amount of waste burned for energy grew fourfold in 30 years, but total dioxin emissions fell by 99 per cent. Power companies boasted that their only emissions were water vapour. It was almost too good to be true. Like a small intestine for society, incinerators digested the detritus of modern life, extracting every last drop of usefulness and turning it into energy.
But the intestine still had to poop. And Sweden sent the poop to Norway. Yet the hype about Sweden’s smart way of dealing with rubbish has been immense. Here is James Corden on the popular Late Show on US television in late 2016:
Guys, this is going to blow your mind. In Sweden, they burn waste in gigantic, state-of-the-art recycling plants and use that energy for heat. It’s really cool but there’s one problem. They’ve run out of trash and they’re having to import it from other countries. So to keep their economy running, they have to import trash. Sweden is amazing, it’s incredible. The people are beautiful, they have no trash, nothing bad ever happens there. The worst thing to happen to that entire country is when the band ABBA broke up.
You don’t need James Corden to tell you that, outside its borders, Sweden has an exceptionally good reputation on the environment. The biggest international story to come out of Sweden in 2018 was ‘plogging’, billed as a Swedish fitness craze for jogging while picking up rubbish, which added to the hype. ‘If there’s a paradise for environmentalists, this Nordic nation must be it,’ a French journalist wrote recently. When you try to unpack the reasons for this, however, the question ‘Where’s the poop?’ keeps nagging away.
Part of the problem is untangling the measures that really make a difference from those that just sound nice, but frankly are fluffy and ineffectual. Janey Mehks is Stockholm’s business development manager for ‘cleantech’. Cleantech, she explains, is any technology that is better for the environment than existing technology. ‘So everything, basically.’ Mehks can point to all sorts of initiatives that come under the cleantech rubric – shared car services, green development zones, the world’s first urban biochar carbon sink, rooftop agriculture, automated vacuum waste collection – but which of these are significant, and which are cute but little more than good PR? It is all presented as clever, new, innovative and sustainable, often with a slick video featuring a breathless narrator, upbeat music and images of smiling children. But where’s the poop?
Swedes are not genetically nicer or cleaner than any other people, yet when it comes to their greenness, there tends to be a simplistic emphasis on the positive. ‘People’s environmental awareness is higher here,’ says Mehks. ‘We are close to the archipelago and nature, people go into the countryside at the weekends.’ You don’t need to be a dyed-in-the-wool climate sceptic to find statements like this unconvincing. A group of foreign students in Stockholm in 2018 were treated to a boat tour of the archipelago along with a speaker on ‘Sweden’s interaction with nature and how that informs our business philosophy’. Who did they think they were kidding?
In some respects, greenness comes easy for a country with no fossil fuel reserves, lots of wide, open spaces and a temperate climate. More than half of the energy Sweden generates is from renewable sources, of which the lion’s share is hydropower. This puts it ahead of the rest of the EU, although behind Norway and Iceland. Sweden also has abundant forests, creating a renewable supply of biomass as fuel. And it is cold up north, attracting energy-intensive industries such as data centres, which use the low temperature as free cooling for their vast arrays of computers. In 2018, Facebook announced it would double the size of its data centres in Luleå, near the Arctic Circle, attracted by the cold, cheap hydropower and tax breaks. At the time of the announcement, Facebook was already consuming more than 1 per cent of Sweden’s total energy production, a proportion set to double with the expansion. Facebook is not alone – Stockholm receives inquiries from data-centre companies almost every week, says Mehks.
When it comes to incineration, the country has been well served by the old Swedish model. District heating – where a central boiler supplies heat to many homes – spread rapidly in Sweden in the 1960s, consistent with a prevailing acceptance of centralised, community-wide solutions to social issues at the time. While centralised heating systems involve inevitable heat losses and big initial investments, there were also many advantages: cheap oil could be used to fire the boilers; large, centralised heating plants were efficient to maintain and could also generate electricity – so-called combined heat and power; surplus heat from industry, and everything from data centres to shops, could be fed into the system. And it was much easier to control emissions from a few large power plants than tens of thousands of local or domestic heating systems. As a result, about half of Sweden’s homes are heated by district heating systems, and in Stockholm it is 80 per cent.
When concerns began to grow about greenhouse gas emissions, it was then relatively easy to switch to burning biomass and household or industrial waste in the district heating boilers. Crucially, the revenue from selling heat and power is sufficient to allow operators to make a suitable profit, despite the high cost of cleaning toxins from the emissions. District heating was an integral part of the folkhemmet – the people’s home promised by the Swedish model in its earlier incarnation (see Chapter 16) – and ‘one of the main reasons that Sweden performs so well on the environment,’ says Fortum, a Finnish energy company that runs several combined heat and power stations in Sweden.
Sweden has also benefited from some good timing and bold moves on the environment, helping to form its reputation as a world leader on this issue. In 1968, the Swedish government proposed that the United Nations hold its first summit on the environment, which it did in Stockholm in 1972, marking a turning point in global green politics and putting sustainability on the UN’s agenda. The Stockholm Conference, as it came to be known, threw down a marker for the rest of the world. In 1991, Sweden became one of the first countries to tax carbon, gradually raising its levy to be the highest in the world. The tax has helped the country cut greenhouse gas emissions by a quarter even while the economy has grown by 60 per cent – it has ‘decoupled’ from emissions, to use the jargon. A tax on nitrogen oxide emissions from power plants, introduced in 1992, saw emissions decline by 50 per cent per unit of energy produced. In 2010, Stockholm became the first city to be named ‘the green capital of Europe’, thanks to its efforts on noise pollution, cleaner water, waste disposal and open spaces. It gave the city a marketing boost and created a new surge of interest around Sweden’s green credentials.
At the UN’s climate change conference in Paris in 2015, countries agreed to try to keep the increase in global average temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This spurred another eye-catching initiative in Stockholm, where left and right agreed that the country should aim to have zero carbon emissions by 2045. Shortly after, Sweden became the first country to legislate to be ‘climate neutral’ before the mid-point of the century. Stockholm aimed to reach the target even earlier.