SEP 18

Sweden is a country with an especially good national recycling program and broad public participation. It is so good that only 4 percent of household waste goes into landfills. Sweden also has a lot of district heating plants, which produce electricity and hot water that is distributed for heating to nearby homes and businesses. Many of these plants rely on trash incineration to generate the heat to run the systems. Trash incinceration provides 20 percent of the district heating in Sweden. These plants also generate the electricity for 250,000 homes.

The problem is that Swedish power plants need more trash to feed these plants than the country is producing, so the country is looking to import trash from its European neighbors to fuel these plants. At present, they are importing waste from neighboring Norway to fuel these plants.

Getting rid of trash and producing energy may seem like a win-win, but trash incineration plants have serious downsides. They produce large amounts of dioxins which can be released into the atmosphere. There are also toxins and heavy metals in the ash that remains after the material is burned, and that needs to be disposed of carefully.

Fortunately, the Swedes realize the limitations in trash burning. "This is not a long-term solution really, because we need to be better to reuse and recycle, but in the short perspective I think it’s quite a good solution," Ostlund concluded.

image: CC by Mikael Lindmark/Wikimedia Commons

via: Living on Earth

Comments (7)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

better way to burn
written by Brian Cartwright, September 18, 2012

Burning trash is a big challenge, because there's so little control over what goes into the trash, so it's always crucial to educate for eco-intelligence, and to enforce as necessary.
But there's also a better way to combust carbon-based biomass: pyrolysis. See listed website for the ideas springing up all over the world and being implemented as carbon-negative technology!

• 
• +4
• 
• 

burn not a clean
written by yesillink, September 19, 2012

burn only reduces the volume of. Not a real waste management.

• 
• +0
• 
• 

...
written by Ecosystem, September 21, 2012

Who can ever thought that we can produce energy from trash. The nordic countries, have some of the most sophisticated environment technologies, but also ideas. The downside though are very important to consider. It's very good that they import trash and have found a way to capitalize, but what about the dioxins that in time can cause serious damage to the athmosphere. We live in the industrialized no doubt, but what is the next step, what reserve us this ongoing pollution that we keep doing it to the environment.!? I hardly think that we can have a safe time, in 20-30 years from now. The world starts to be day by day more and more drawn, attracted by technology, improvment - but negative.

• 
• +0
• 
• 

Student
written by Q, September 26, 2012

This a fascinating thought... a country has become so good at reducing their trash production that they actually need to import some to maintain proper operation of their facilities. I'm glad to see that they do not believe this is a long-term solution, but I do hope that other countries might take notice of how opposite this problem is from those usually faced by countries when it comes to the amount of trash they produce. If Sweden can reduce their trash production this much, clearly we should be attempting to apply their procedures in other countries around the world.

• 
• +1
• 
• 

This is great
written by Environmentalist, October 02, 2012

The emissions from these plants in comparison to the emissions the households would do if they all used independant heating is worth a consideration. Instead of using fossil fuels for the heating, which was the case before the district heating plants. They now use recycled waste with low emissions. The biggest part of the fuels used in these plants are waste products from paper, and wood industries.

• 
• +0
• 
• 

Thats cool!
written by Eliza , October 30, 2012

I think that is amazing that they even burn trash to start off with. If the US could look into some of the possibilities to be a greener country, it would be a huge boost. It's so cool that they actually have gotten their trash down to such a minimum that they need to find more trash. If we, in the US, could adopt some of these creative ways to help our environment we would be on our way to succes.

• 
• +0
• 
• 

...
written by Mathias, November 15, 2012

I'm so tired of always hearing about dangerous dioxins being a problem with waste incineration! Yes, dioxin is very bad, and yes dioxin is produced when burning waste, but only when burnt at too low temperatures, like when burning it in a heap on the ground! In all modern incinerators dioxins have long been eliminated. Please stop using this kind of disinformation and scaremongering! Incineration is an excellent way to deal with waste that can't be recycled any other way, especially if both the heat and electricity is used, as done in Sweden (where I'm from).

• 
• +1
• 
• 

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (registered users only)

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment