Demand for garbage triggers Norway- Sweden tug-of-war

NORWAY AND SWEDEN are locked in a tugof-war over dozens of lorries that cross the border each day carrying loads of precious cargo: garbage.

Sweden is conscientious when it comes to sorting and recycling its waste and is in the rare position of lacking garbage for its incineration centers, which produce enough electricity for 250,000 homes and heat for 950,000 homes.

As a result, it has to import around two million tons of waste per year, primarily from neighboring Norway but also from Britain, the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark and Ireland.

“It’s like a market,” Weine Wiqvist, head of the Swedish Waste Management and Recycling Association which represents the industry, explains to AFP.

“Transporting waste from countries to other countries is a business driven by the balance of supply and demand.”

It is however an atypical market where the exporters (municipalities and industries) pay the importers ( incineration companies) to burn their “products”.

Incineration companies have popped up like mushrooms in Sweden in recent years, pushing fees down, which has enticed Norwegian municipalities with strained budgets to look across the border to get rid of their waste.

This has led to some absurd situations.

The municipality of Voss on Norway’s west coast sends its waste to Jonkoping, around 800 kilometers (500 miles) away in central Sweden, even though there is an incineration center in Bergen just 100 kilometers away.

Norwegian industry officials accuse their Swedish counterparts of dumping prices, preventing not only their nascent industry from growing but also hindering efforts to develop an eco-friendly district heating network.

“Beer and tobacco aren’t the only things that are cheaper in Sweden. Waste management is also cheaper over there,” says Odd Terje Dovik, the head of the Returkraft incineration center in the southern Norwegian town of Kristiansand.

“The Norwegian centers that could have burned this waste have to in turn import from Britain,” he adds.

The transportation of the waste has an environmental cost, although the Swedes defend their practice.

“There have been a lot of calculations and research on this. And they found out that the transportation itself is almost negligible,” insists Mr. Wiqvist.

“It’s very little compared to the savings you make when you take waste away from a country — where it would otherwise have been landfilled — and you use it as a fuel because when you use it as a fuel, you replace other fuels like coal or natural gas,” he adds. —