Opinion: How can we keep trash out of landfills?

What it does with the other half is what sets Sweden apart from much of the world.

Nearly all of Sweden’s non-recycled waste is burned to generate electricity and heat. It’s a method that, while emitting CO2, is far better for the climate than sending garbage to landfills, according to the Swedish government and proponents of waste-to-energy technology.

“Energy recovery is the best available technology for treating and utilizing the energy in different residual wastes that can’t easily be recycled,” said Klas Svensson, a waste-to-energy technical advisor at Avfall Sverige, Sweden’s waste management association.

Credit: Joerg Boethling

Credit: Joerg Boethling

Sweden was an early adopter of waste-to-energy. Its first plant started operating amid a post-war home-building boom in the late 1940s. The new houses were connected to district heating networks, which generate heat at a central location and pump it out to individual homes, rather than each house having its own boiler.

Over the years, more of the energy powering these district heating networks was supplied by waste-to-energy power plants, with major expansions beginning in the 1970s. Today, Sweden has 34 waste-to-energy plants supplying 1,445,000 households with heat and 780,000 households with electricity — impressive figures for a country with a population of only 10 million.

One of the largest of these power plants is called Sysav. It is among the most efficient plants in the country, burning around 600,000 tons of waste annually, enough to cover 60 percent of the heat requirements of Malmö, a city of 300,000 inhabitants.

Yet overall, waste-to-energy plants provide a relatively small proportion of Sweden’s power, over 80 percent of which comes from a combination of hydro and nuclear energy. Their main benefit is keeping trash out of landfills.

In many countries, such as the United States, landfills are one of the largest sources of methane, a greenhouse gas that is far more toxic to the climate than carbon dioxide.

This is why waste-to-energy advocates argue that, despite their CO2 emissions, such plants are far less harmful than methane-oozing landfills, and why the rest of the EU, which sends 24 percent of its waste to landfills, should adopt the Swedish model.

To some degree, they have.

There are 492 waste-to-energy power plants across Europe, burning 96 million tons of waste annually to supply almost 20 million people with electricity. Probably the best-known is not in Sweden, but in neighboring Denmark.

The Amager Bakke waste-to-energy plant on the outskirts of Copenhagen — which aims to become the world’s first zero-emissions city by 2025 — has received international attention for a ski slope made of green plastic that descends from its roof, plus a climbing wall, a park, a café and an environmental education center.

The plant collects waste from 600,000 inhabitants and 68,000 companies, burning it to produce steam, which drives turbines to generate electricity or is fed directly into Copenhagen’s district heating network.

Some 10 percent of the energy provided to European district heating networks comes from waste-to-energy plants. Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Spain, the UK and Denmark have all recently opened new ones. At the same time, older ones have been modernized.

In Wuppertal, Germany, for example, in a region formerly dominated by the steel and coal industries, the district heating network was connected to a waste-to-energy plant in 2018. This replaced heat that had previously come from a coal-fired power plant, which has been decommissioned.

Moreover, the Wuppertal municipal utility recently began operating a hydrogen filling station for 20 local public buses using electricity from the waste-to-energy power plant.

Not everyone in Europe sees waste-to-energy power plants as a good thing, however.

“We believe that the current system for dealing with residuals, i.e. waste-to-energy incineration, is outdated and broken,” said Janek Vahk from the NGO Zero Waste Europe. “Waste-to-energy prevents proper recycling and makes climate change worse.”

Vahk is also skeptical about the plants’ safety.

To mitigate some of their worst effects, since the mid-1980s Sweden has developed increasingly stringent standards to reduce power plant emissions, and it is working on CO2 capture and storage at waste-to-energy plants.

It has also brought its share of recycled municipal waste to 37 percent. And by 2025, food and residual waste is expected to be just one quarter of what it was in 2015.

Klaus Sieg writes for Reasons to Be Cheerful, a nonprofit editorial project that strives to serve as a tonic for these tumultuous times.

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