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The waste-fuelled district heating power plant outside Gothenburg. Photo: Renova.
Sometimes actions that were once taken to get rid of a dilemma can actually create new ones. This is now the case in Gothenburg [map], where the burning of waste has become an important way of providing houses with heat, warm water and electricity. So important, that when the amount of garbage that was produced in the Gothenburg region started decreasing about two years ago, there was suddenly a lack of waste!
Now garbage is imported from Norway to fill the gap. Newspaper Göteborgs-Posten reports that 140 000 tons of Norwegian waste is burnt every year at the Renova waste-fuelled district heating power plant outside Gothenburg. In other waste-fuelled power plants in Sweden the situation is the same, and totally about 600 000 tons of waste from abroad is now believed to be incinerated here.
Norway is happy to get rid of its waste since it would otherwise be going to landfill, something that the European Union wants countries to stop doing.
But several environmental organisations are sceptical to waste-burning and mean that we should avoid producing waste in the first place.
The Swedish national environmental objectives has set up the goal of not increasing the amount of waste.
And with ideas like Cradle2Cradle, where the aim is zero waste, the question is what will happen to our waste-fuelled heating power plants in the long run?
