What the Swedes can teach us about recycling

Carley Olley
Apr 20, 2018, updated Apr 20, 2018

Australia has a recycling crisis. That became crystal clear this week, when Ipswich City Council abandoned its recycling program following concerns over spiralling costs.

After a public backlash, the Queensland council reversed its decision the next day, but the initial moved sparked dire warnings of a cascade of other councils following Ipswich’s lead.

“We believe it’ll be the first of many in Queensland, and indeed across Australia,” Local Government Association of Queensland chief executive Greg Hallam said about Ipswich’s initial move.

“Since China has closed its doors to our waste, the effective cost increases to councils are 400 and 500 per cent – it’s just not feasible that councils can sustain those losses.”

In January, China banned the importation of 24 categories of waste – affecting about 600,000 tonnes of Australian recycling a year, and sparking panic among local governments.

nobody thought shipping recycling thousands of k's instead of doing it here (despite higher cost) was perhaps 'non-ecologically sound'? "Queensland city to stop recycling due to rising costs" | The New Daily https://t.co/1upzrkhK8t

— Queen NomNom De Plume 🐀 (@stinginthetail) April 19, 2018

Australians are well used to kerbside recycling – 98 per cent of the country’s households recycle their rubbish. But we’re a long way from the best in the world at it.

That title goes to the Germans, who recycle nearly 60 per cent of their municipal waste. But – depending on how you define and measure recycling – the Germans may need to tip their hat to the Swedes, who recycle 99 per cent of all the nation’s rubbish.

In Sweden, there are recycling stations within 300 metres of all residential areas. Half of the country’s rubbish is burned – turned into energy that powers a national heating system (rubbish is even sometimes imported from other countries to power the incinerators).

This process is not without controversy. Dr Dominic Hogg, chairman of British environmental consultancy Eunomia, says “incineration is not recycling“.

“We should be trying to reduce our waste and recycle more of what we do create, [and] then we should expect a diminishing amount of residual waste available for incineration or landfill,” he said. “The solution is not to keep building more and more incineration plants.”

Waste reduction is also a thing in Sweden, however. Newspapers are turned into paper mass, bottles are reused or melted into new items, plastic containers become plastic raw material, food is composted into soil or biogas. Rubbish trucks often run on recycle-generated electricity or biogas. Waste water is purified to be drinkable.

Sweden also continues to look for other ways to reach a zero waste target.

Clothing company H&M offers discounts for returned clothing, and there are proposals for government-sponsored ads about avoiding food waste. The city of Helsingborg even has musical rubbish bins to make recycling a more pleasant experience.

Within the European Union, such strategies are not uncommon. The EU has also exported tonnes of rubbish to China every year.

Now that that is no longer an option, the EU is pushing harder for “zero waste”. Measures include aiming to make all plastic packaging recyclable or reusable by 2030 and a possible tax on virgin plastics (non-recycled plastics).

In addition, EU countries have raised recycling targets for other packaging materials – paper and cardboard, metals and glass – to 70 per cent by 2030.