Lindkoping is a small town for 150 thousand people, located 200 kilometers from Stockholm. As the locals say, for the Swedes, he is something like Bologo: many passed by by train, but never visited. In a residential area, there is no smog or odors in the air that are familiar to a resident of an average industrial city in Russia. It is hard to guess that in the city, five kilometers from the houses, there is a large waste sorting and incineration plant, which is loaded at 100% capacity all year round. The plant is owned by the municipal company Tekniska verken. The communal holding recycles waste, maintains waste sorting stations, and also produces electricity and heat, earning 20 million euros per year for the budget of the town.
There are four dozen such factories throughout Sweden, and their work significantly reduces the disposal of waste to landfills.
Back in the early 90s, the Swedes took about 1.4 million tons of garbage to landfills annually. Since 1995, this figure began to be forcibly reduced: first, the packaging manufacturers were obliged to take care of its processing in advance, then a tax was imposed on the storage of garbage in landfills. A major turning point in the fight against waste came after 2002, when the government banned the disposal of waste that can be burned in landfills. As a result, today only 0.7% of household waste in Sweden is sent to landfills, and taking into account industrial waste, less than 200 thousand tons of waste are disposed of per year.
CHP in the center of Lindköping. Niklas Virsen.
According to the representative of Tekniska verken, Juhan Buk, not every country can build an efficient energy system using waste incineration, but Sweden has a technical advantage - a central heating system.
Lindköping's facility recycles about a million tons of waste into energy a year, and now three quarters of all heat in the city is generated from waste. This waste comes here not only from nearby cities, but also from abroad: Britain and Italy pay Sweden 60 euros per ton of garbage to burn it here. It is beneficial for them: in the same Britain, for storing a ton of garbage in a landfill, they would have to pay about 100 euros.
For economic reasons, the Swedes themselves do not arrange landfills unnecessarily.
“The tax on carrying something to the landfill is 1,000 kroons. Energy producers can take this and burn it for 500 CZK. As a result, the company receives income, and the garbage producer saves money that he would have given as a tax for landfill,”explains Johan Buk.
Promotional video:
Despite the amount of incineration, Lindköping aims to become a carbon-neutral city by 2025 through modern filtration and environmental remediation systems.
Not only entrepreneurs are responsible for sorting waste, but also the residents themselves, who collect organic waste separately. Dmitry Komarov / Znak.com
Incineration is not the only way to get energy from waste. The Swedes use a “dual collection” system: organic waste is collected separately to be loaded into biogas plants. The waste is mixed, heated to 70 degrees to kill pathogenic bacteria, and pumped into the decay chambers. After a while, the chamber produces "raw gas" with a methane content of 55%. Carbon dioxide is "washed out" from it to bring the methane content to 97%.
In this form, the gas is sent to filling stations and boiler houses, where it is used as an environmentally friendly fuel. The organic matter remaining from the production of gas is used for fertilizers, which are later used by local farmers in their work. According to Johan Buk, out of 100 thousand tons of waste used for biogas production during the year, the municipality receives the same amount of fertilizers.
So far, only 15.5% of all waste in Sweden is used for biogas production. About 50% of the waste is incinerated in factories, and the remaining 34% is sent for recycling and the creation of new products. However, this is a rather promising direction: this year in Lindköping they completely abandoned coal combustion, switching coal-fired boilers to biogas. Already today, every fourth bus and every hundredth car in Stockholm run on biogas created from garbage and waste sludge, and this share is planned to increase.
Trash ladder
Waste becomes less not only due to incineration, but also due to the desire to reduce its flow at the initial stage. The key to understanding Swedish waste management is the trash ladder principle. According to him, the best thing that can be done in this area is not to produce waste at all, initially giving up packaging or excess production. If the waste has already been created, then it can be reused: do not throw away furniture that can still be used, but resell it. A separate place is allocated for the collection of such unnecessary things at the sorting yards.
The garbage that cannot be redistributed is sent for recycling: new bottles are made from plastic bottles (one bottle can go through up to seven “reprinting” cycles), from waste paper - new paper or building materials, garden waste becomes fertilizer. And only that which is not suitable for any of the purposes is given away for energy production. Poor quality and contaminated plastic and other unsorted waste is incinerated, and biogas is made with organic waste. Only tiles, dishes, ceramics and building materials remain at landfills, which cannot be burned or recycled.
If in Russia the garbage reform is built on the basis of consumers of goods - that is, from citizens who have raised tariffs for garbage disposal in order to create new landfills and incinerators, then in Sweden the work is done “from above” and starts from the packaging manufacturers.
“In Sweden, you simply cannot sell a product and not know how the packaging will be disposed of. It is the responsibility of the manufacturer to ensure that all the waste is collected, separated and recycled,”explains Johan Buk.
-One company is engaged in this work, and if you sell something in Sweden, you must participate in it. In return, manufacturers receive a small stake in the company. This encourages manufacturers to take a more responsible approach to what they are selling."
Responsibility for recycling waste lies with citizens, and without their participation in sorting, the system is unlikely to be as effective. To begin with, Swedish cities have introduced dual waste collection: separation into organic and inorganic waste. In different cities, organic waste can be put either in a separate tank or in green garbage bags. In the latter case, the garbage will be taken to a sorting plant, where robots will use an optical scanner to separate the green bags from the rest and send them to a biogas station.
Garbage suitable for recycling is taken by the Swedes to municipal sorting stations: glass, plastic, wood, garden waste, electronics, old household appliances, furniture and other bulky items are thrown away separately. The average Swede visits such a station three to four times a year without any government coercion.
As the expert of the investment platform Smart City Sweden Markus Lind explains, ecological thinking in citizens is brought up from kindergarten.
“Children learn how to sort garbage, how to classify it, and then they themselves teach their parents how to do it right. There is nothing more effective than pressure on the conscience from your children, - says Lind.
“Several delegations from China came to visit us, and they were shocked by the way Swedish people sort the garbage at the station: without being forced to come on purpose and line up to hand over the garbage.”
90% of plastic bottles Swedes hand over on their own, getting back the recycling fee - one or two crowns.
In addition to the pressure on the conscience, people in Sweden have an understandable economic incentive: if you sort garbage, you save money. So, in large supermarkets in Sweden, you can hand over a plastic bottle for recycling, returning the recycling fee invested in the cost of the goods - one or two crowns, depending on the volume of the bottle. 90% of bottles in Sweden are collected this way, and as a result, last year the country managed to recycle 2 billion cans and bottles, 200 pieces per person in Sweden.
Coming to the sorting station on your own is also cost effective. In some cities, the fee for the garbage collection service is fixed, but in Lindköping, for example, the rate floats, and people pay for the weight of the actually handed over waste. Their waste is weighed directly into the garbage truck, so the city knows exactly how much garbage each house produces - and homeowners have an incentive to reduce the total weight of garbage by handing in the sorted waste for recycling.
On average, there are 466 kilograms of garbage per person in Sweden per year. The average family of four pays 150-200 euros for garbage collection during the year. People know that for this money, their garbage will be recycled or converted into electricity or heat.
For comparison, a family of four living in a private house in Nizhny Tagil will pay about 100 euros for garbage collection in 2019. For this money, she will receive another landfill near the city, which in a few years may become an environmental problem.
Waste incineration is a technological and socio-economic dead end
Garbage incineration also has a downside that is dangerous to the environment: emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere. Sweden now burns half of all waste, and a significant part of the volume is plastic waste. According to the vice-mayor for ecology of Stockholm Katharina Lur, 86% of all plastic packaging is now burned in the capital of Sweden. Sorting of plastic in the country is done only in one place, and this resource is clearly not enough.
Recycled plastic in this way contributes not only to the growth of carbon dioxide emissions, but also to the formation of new toxic landfills.
“Waste incineration is a dead-end branch of waste management: instead of trying to save resources as much as possible, they are destroyed in the stove. In the process of incineration, slag and ash are formed (30% of the volume of waste incinerated); this is waste of a higher hazard class that must be disposed of at specially equipped landfills. Therefore, incineration does not actually solve the problem of landfills,”explains Irina Skipor, media coordinator of the Zero Waste Project at Greenpeace Russia.
So far, Sweden is not in a position to dispose of toxic ash on its own: it pays 1000 euros per ton of ash to Norway to bury the waste in its limestone mines, where they should not harm the environment. To optimize costs, Sweden is developing its own solution for neutralizing and storing ash, but this does not fundamentally change the problem: this type of waste will still need to be stored somewhere.
“From the point of view of ecology, it is necessary not to constantly fight the consequences of the waste problem, but to eradicate its cause. And the reason is the overconsumption of excess packaging, the production of disposable goods and the use of a large amount of non-recyclable packaging. Ideally, you should aim for a cyclical economy. It assumes that all the resources that a person extracts or produces are used over and over again. In such an economy there is no waste, but there are secondary material resources,”says Irina Skipor.
For the same reasons, activists believe that it is pointless to use the Swedish experience in Russia: now the country is already producing electricity and heat in abundance.
In Russia, about 7% of household waste is recycled and utilized somehow. In Europe, this figure reaches 80%.