dirty power: sweden wants your garbage for energyaccording to statistics from avfall sverige,...
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Dirty power: Sweden wants your garbage for energy
Trash is a fast-growing import in the
Scandinavian country, which turns it into heat for
people's homes March 27, 2015 5:00AM ET
by Elisabeth Braw @elisabethbraw
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A garbage dump in Göteborg, Sweden.Martin Almqvist / Johnér Images / Corbis
Every day, some 300 trucks arrive at a plant
outside the city of Göteborg on the west coast of
Sweden. They carry garbage, but they are not here
to dump the cargo. Instead, they deliver it to the
plant’s special ovens, which burn it, providing heat
to thousands of local homes.
“The only fuel we use is waste,” says Christian
Löwhagen, spokesman for Renova, the local
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government-owned energy company operating the
plant. “It provides one-third of heat for households
in this region.” Across Sweden, 950,000 homes are
heated by trash; this lowly resource also provides
electricity for 260,000 homes across the country,
according to statistics from Avfall Sverige,
Sweden’s national waste-management association.
Indeed, with Swedes recycling almost half (47
percent) of their waste and using 52 percent to
generate heat, less than 1 percent of garbage now
ends up in the dump. “Sweden has the world’s best
network of district heating plants” — essentially
large ovens that use a variety of fuels to generate
heat, which is then transported to consumers’
homes through a network of underground pipes —
“and they’re well-suited for use of garbage,” says
Adis Dzebo, an energy expert at the Stockholm
Environment Institute. “By contrast, in many other
countries the heat and electricity infrastructure is
based on gas or other fossil fuels, so it’s not
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economical to start building plants that utilize
garbage.”
Here’s the problem: the Swedes — as well as the
Germans, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians —
have become so good at recycling that there’s no
longer enough garbage to meet the heating plants’
needs. Sweden now has to import the trash that
most other countries are trying to dispose of, some
800,000 tons in 2014, up from 550,000 tons in
2010, according to Avfall Sverige.
Last year, Renova brought in 100,000 tons of
foreign garbage, mostly from Britain, in addition to
the 435,000 tons supplied by Swedish
municipalities. In Stockholm, energy provider
Fortum also imports garbage, and in the southern
city of Malmö, the Sysav energy company brought
in 135,000 tons of waste from Norway and Britain
last year, according to the company’s
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communications director, Gunilla Carlsson. That’s
an almost 100 percent leap from the year before.
“We try to stay up-to-date on where well-sorted
garbage is available,” says Löwhagen. “We only
use waste where all recyclable bits have been
taken out. In Europe, enormous amounts of
garbage are put in landfill, so we’re doing other
countries a favor by taking care of it for them.” In
order to minimize cost and environmental impact,
companies try to get a cheap ride for their garbage
on ships coming to Sweden that would otherwise
have empty holds.
You wouldn’t believe how many emails we
get every week from people offering us
garbage.
Weine Wiqvist CEO of Sweden’s waste-management association
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It’s not that Swedish decision-makers foresaw the
need to safely dispose of garbage when they
started building a countrywide network of district
heating plants a generation ago, but it turned out to
be a fortuitous move when public concern over
trash in landfills prompted the country to rethink its
garbage-disposal policies. Today putting waste on
the trash heap is banned, which means that
municipalities have to sort, recycle and, yes, burn,
their residents’ garbage. As a result, waste now
constitutes 19 percent of the fuel used by district-
heating plants, which heat half of Sweden’s
households and also use biomass such as leftover
tree branches from the logging industry. That
makes Sweden the world leader in energy
generated from garbage; it is followed by, in order,
the Czech Republic, Denmark, Norway and
Finland.
Using garbage for energy neatly solves the issue of
excessive reliance on landfills while at the same
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time helping address residents’ energy and heating
needs. And as Sysav, Renova and district-heating
operators are owned by the cities they serve, they
have an obligation to use waste. Not that it’s a
heavy burden: The energy companies get the
resource for free and sell the resulting heat and
electricity. Measured by the volume of garbage
used to produce energy, the United States — not
surprisingly, given its much larger population —
tops the list, with 29 million tons. Still, that’s just 12
percent of the waste generated by Americans.
This is how the waste-to-energy process works:
After recyclable content has been removed, the
garbage is placed in incinerators that produce heat
or energy, which is then transported to nearby
homes. From the ashes, small pieces of metal,
which do not burn, are separated and recycled,
while those of porcelain and tile are sifted to extract
gravel, which is used in road construction. The
remaining one percent goes into landfills. And
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though garbage-infused smoke sounds highly
poisonous, thanks to electric filters that give the
particles a negative electric charge, in Sweden the
smoke is almost entirely nontoxic carbon dioxide
and water, which are cleaned again before release.
“I know that district heating means they burn
garbage, but it’s not something I pay any attention
to,” says Göteborg resident Karin Fjellander. “The
thing about district heating is that it’s supposed to
be green, so if the smoke was poisonous I don’t
think they’d keep doing it.”
Because waste in landfills generates methane, a
concentrated form of CO2, the Swedish municipal
association estimates that every ton of imported
garbage — which would otherwise have been
decomposing in landfills — saves 1,100 pounds of
CO2 equivalent. Even if ships were to travel
specifically to deliver this garbage, the trade would
still end up a net positive for the environment.
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“You wouldn’t believe how many emails we get
every week from people offering us garbage,” says
Weine Wiqvist, CEO of Avfall Sverige.
For now, Sweden imports its trash mostly from
Britain and Norway. According to Löwhagen, “But
since our trading partners pay us to dispose of their
garbage, we prefer to say that we’re exporting a
service” — waste disposal. Either way, Sweden’s
garbage needs are skyrocketing: According to
Avfall Sverige, the country will import 1.5 million
tons of waste this year and 2.3 million tons in 2020.
But with recycling rates increasing, the European
Union has advised its member states to start
building district-heating facilities that can also
produce energy. Delegations from various
countries including Poland, India and China now
regularly visit Sweden to learn about garbage heat
and energy.
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Waste being unloaded in Göteborg for transport to the Renova plant.Courtesy Lars Ardarve via Renova
Austrians and Germans already recycle more than
60 percent of their garbage, while other Western
European countries are not far behind. Meanwhile,
the EU has commanded every member state to
reach 50 percent by 2020. In the United States, 34
percent of trash is now recycled, up from 10
percent in 2000, according to the Environmental
Protection Agency. “From a climate perspective, it’s
better to burn garbage for heat and energy than
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putting it in landfill,” notes Dzebo. “But if everyone
begins to use garbage for energy, there won’t be
enough of it.”
A most unusual dilemma, then, compounded by the
fact that garbage is so voluminous and prone to
smelliness that transporting it from the other side of
the globe would be expensive and impractical. “The
Netherlands imports some from Italy, but in
contrast to oil and gas, it’s not a good you can ship
around the globe,” says Wiqvist. Still, Löwhagen
and his colleagues hope that Sweden’s pioneer
status will help it keep ahead of the pack.
Developing countries, for their part, may get access
to funding from the United Nations-affiliated Green
Climate Fund should they decide to invest in
waste-to-energy plants. “The Green Climate Fund
is currently developing its investment framework,
and one of the issues the members are discussing
is whether waste-to-energy should receive climate
funding as a renewable energy source,” explains
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Dzebo. “But it’s important that this model goes
hand in hand with efficient sorting of the garbage,
including the removal of recyclable and toxic
material.” Developing countries will, in other words,
have to show the Green Climate Fund that they
don’t just plan to burn their waste wholesale but are
also making serious efforts to reduce it.
Winqvist says he is not concerned about
consumers’ increasingly diligent recycling, even
though it reduces the volume of waste available for
energy production. “After a couple of recycling
rounds, paper can’t be reused again, so you have
to burn it,” he explains. “And putting garbage in
landfill will always be cheaper than burning it. Even
with people recycling more, there’s going to be
plenty of waste for heating and energy plants.”
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