The Hidden Truth Behind Sweden's Waste Disposal Infrastructure

elsinore the site of historical battles and theatrical tumult here Hamlet famously agonized over a decision so while on the neighborhood I thought it's a perfect place for me to ask a burning question to burn or not to burn that is the question whether is wise in the earth to bury the junk and plastics of outrageous convenience or to take energy from a sea of trouble some waste and by burning end them sorry Shakespeare [Music] [Music] [Music] I've come to Sweden and while I'm enjoying this beautiful city of islands it's much less picturesque part of this country of 10 million that I've come to see ever since I became known for going through everyone's bins people have come up to me and told me you should copy what Sweden does with its waste they burn a lot of it and turn it into energy thank you this so-called waste-to-energy process is becoming the new go-to solution in Australia so I've come here to find out if this would be a good fix for our garbage crisis our search starts at 5 a.m. on the Baltic Sea Sweden has become known as the darling of the waste world according to the government they recycle 99% of their waste and this boat here is part of the story are so successful with their waste there now they importing it from other countries thus we freighter left from England three days ago and on board three thousand tons of rubbish on its way to Westeros in Sweden about to be burnt [Music] Sweden is turning other countries trash into cash the bales in this boat will earn them around $200,000 and all up Sweden makes around a hundred million dollars a year from this trade they mix the imports with local rubbish and it's incinerated in 34 plants dotted around the country they say this is better than Australia's approach of burying waste in landfill the government here even calls it recycling but I'm not so sure so I've come to this plant at vaster us to see for myself Wow look at this that is a bit frightening this is supposed to be the stuff that's left over in the garbage after homes and businesses have taken out all the recycling what do you count this as a renewable or recyclable well recyclable because this is recycling this is racing we're turning it into energy so we see it as a kind of recycling for me recycling is taking something and turning it back into a product that can keep going yeah energy we turned into energy so that's the way we look at it that's not how I look at it but the plant does try to remove some leftover recyclables we can take out metals parts of aluminum glass and sand smaller rocks and that cetera in what's left there's a lot of paper wood and also plastic the best thing would be of course to recycle the plastic but once it has entered the waste well once the plastic is waste this is one good way of taking care of it this movie actual action happens I Wow so this is the boiler how hard is it 900 degrees Celsius within the boiler and this is what it's all about the waste is burnt and it generates both electricity and hot water for heating the town in winter now 60 tons an hour 60 tons of ice an hour but what's left over in Australia arguments against burning waste have centered on the question of toxic emissions Sookie can you guarantee that there's not carcinogens and make our thing well what what are you actually pumping out there there are there are chemicals in it of course but they are according to the regulations that we had to yeah follow so there's a Swedish government monitor what comes out oh yes they do and and we have the highest demands in all Sweden regarding what comes out of the chimney how does it take everything out what happens to them if it takes out all of these toxins what does it do with it well a lot of the toxins are taken out in the in the burning process so they are destroyed in the in the high temperature it's about 900 degrees Celsius another so the actual heat of that boiler makes a difference to getting rid of the image that's part of it yeah but also then we wash the fumes you wash the fear we lost a few keeping emissions clean does not come cheap this plant cost half a billion dollars to build and thirty five million dollars a year to run but it has some nice little earners too it's not just paid to take rubbish the electricity is worth ten million dollars a year central heating though is the big one with 900 kilometers of underground piping to nearly all of the city's homes they rake in 65 million dollars a year [Music] but while the Swedes have found a way to make money from garbage there are a few things that are still bugging me I was really surprised that how much plastic there was in the mix at the waste-to-energy plant how does this fit with Sweden's green energy story Sweden banned landfill many years ago so if I don't finish my lunch it's not gonna end up going into landfill and turning into methane gas which of course is a greenhouse gas but it's the big question I have what happens to those things like these plastic packaging that does end up being thrown away what's the effect if you're burning plastic to find out I'm meeting with Professor urine invadin who studied waste-to-energy for many years what is the effects in terms of emissions of burning plastics well you get co2 emissions you get carbon dioxide emissions like if you incinerate oil I can't believe I'm saying this because I think we come from Australia where most things are buried and I hate the idea of landfill but is it sometimes worse to be burning plastics than actually burying them yes it can be at least in the short term because if you incinerate plastics you get the carbon dioxide emissions immediately whereas if you burn them it will take a long time before they degrade but there can be other problems with landfills it takes up space you can have leachate coming out of toxic at chemicals etc to what extent is recycling rather than burning beneficial recycling is almost always there can be exceptions but almost always more is more beneficial both from an energy perspective and from from the perspective of emissions [Music] those that oppose waste-to-energy also say it gives an easy out for waste and discourages recycling but Sweden sees itself as a leader in the recycling world so I'm keen to see how the locals are keeping these resources away from the furnaces good to meet you builder come on in I'll show you the kitchen sink you I've arranged to meet sarah jean head and her family who have been kind enough to let me see what they do with their garbage so this is where we keep the dry recycling oh yeah this is where that magic happens I get plastics we get the plastic here then there's any kind of place that you put in there yeah everything that dry plastic they go to a lot of trouble to sort waste in two different categories here and then we have here we put glass and and and batteries and catters and I have a bottle refund scheme too little bit money oh no this one so this is good for the kids I see you got the kids to do that and then they get the money for that and they can buy an ice cream Feuer and her brother get the message at home and also at school recycling is good and everyone has to do it it's just like Australia everything's put in plastic now this is starting to feel a bit more like home Sweden seems to have the same over packaging problems I looked at in Australia there is the good bananas so they really have the bad bananas without the plastic but this expensive one they had in territory but this is different the food waste is collected separately and turned into a fuel for buses and cars so it's not much in there no what's left and it isn't much it's destined to be burnt but there's a neat incentive to keep that down to a minimum to the sensor in there in the under bill there's sounds when you say if you put your been out less yeah yeah you pay less as well yeah yeah that's great like most Swedes they don't mind the idea of burning waste to generate energy I mean I think because Berryman's I think it's quite crazy yeah I think it's good because they hit up the houses and after you think that those of us that are bearing it we're crazy you're crazy crazy about crazy man all right but the recycling isn't done yet we have to take it to the local collection business so how long is this worth about a month or more than a month you may be mouth mother sir yeah that was safe though hey Don bye the beans are only a few minutes away and we're not the only ones doing our duty [Music] so how often do you come down to recycle yourself at least once a day once a day yeah yeah because everything is in plastic today and I think it's just stupid I I don't know if it's a recycling or they're just good what's interesting so you actually bring it down here but you don't know if thank you yeah but I do I think I do right but I don't know what it what what separates it then yeah yeah well that's that's interesting you say that yeah we want to know that side but it's a we'll find out we'll tell you tell you we're Richard and Sarah and so many other Swedes seem to be really conscientious about their sorting and their recycling and it's great to see I mean one woman turned up here today on a bicycle to do it but it's a lot more effort I mean it's not just picked up of your curbside so the thing I really want to know is is this leading to higher rates of recycling because if it's not it's leading to higher rates of recyclables being burnt in Sweden that produces that make the packaging are responsible for its recycling the rates for glass and paper are sky-high but for plastics the thing I'm most concerned about I've heard there are some real problems so I'm on my way to visit Sweden's biggest plastics recycler they haven't been returning our calls for this long journey south perhaps unwisely chosen a tiny blue electric car [Music] well I like the idea that my car is partly fueled by waste it doesn't stop me fearing I'm gonna run out of charge well before my destination got range anxiety and I don't know how to charge a car I think I have to be some kind of registered user or something I don't have to eat McDonald's to get my car charged hi hi do you speak English oh you thank you that's great I'm I'm just I've never charged an electric car before I met a a fortum charge station and a McDonald's how do I pay for it and get it to charge mm-hmm yeah I've done that okay and yeah it's working it's charging thank you thank you very much for your help now what do I do after 300 meters turn right with full charge and indigestion we finally arrived at the plastics recycling company called Swarek definitely found that plastics recycling place is absolutely love it here [Music] now espera comment' to recycle 80% of these but an audit was done a couple years ago and found out the recycling less than 40 percent the rest of it was being incinerated see if things have changed hello how are you my name is money if we could speak to the leaf castle my name's Craig Reucassel I'm come from foreign correspondent so very polite Swarek isn't keen to talk well certainly it looks like no one's willing to talk to us about how recycling is done here in hello how are you hello turn off the camera yes sure we're just we're we're keen to talk to leaf Carson he's not here and so we're just saying it's against her well that didn't get us very far so I'm heading further up the chain of command this is fti they're the industry group that organizes most of the packaging recycling in Sweden and contract Swarek surely they know how much plastic is recycled and how much is burned when Swedish people aren't putting all its plastic into recycle and then for instance ferric was only recycling about 38 percent of it the rest has been incinerated that's knowing near enough recycling is it firstly they they broke our contract and that's not okay of course and there was a very very harsh discussion between us and we were not very happy with that how much plastic packaging is meant to be recycled the government says it should be 30 percent and we are upon 47 in Sweden but it turns out those figures aren't what's being recycled only what's being collected does that have to be recycled or is there only percent assumed to be sorting to be sorted for recycling and it doesn't state how much that need to be recycled so what proportion then of the plastic packaging you I don't know that I don't have that sure while FTIR keen to promote their plastic collection rates the figures that really matter are those that were reported to the government which show that less than a third was being recycled and the rest 70% was burnt and when you look at Sweden's total plastic usage and not just packaging it's worse a recent report found that a whopping 84% is ending up at the incinerators [Music] [Music] none of this is making much of a stir in Sweden in fact waste-to-energy isn't really an issue here but across the other side of this famous bridge there is a storm brewing in the rest of Europe [Music] I'm meeting zero-waste campaigners jean-marc Simon in Copenhagen in the shadow of a controversial new waste-to-energy plant surrounded by apartments to quell local opposition to this 860 million dollar plant the designers even included an artificial ski slope on its roof at a state-of-the-art plant like this Jean marks concerns aren't so much about toxic pollutants but the burning of resources it's a huge investment and we have to think like where do we want to put the money into preserving resources or to destroying resources this is a very efficient machine to destroy resources and I would say like probably it will capture most of their pollutants but it's still a machine to destroy resources what we have proven is that for a lot less money you can preserve resources you can like invest in local jobs and like keep the money in the community the EU seems to be taking a similar view bringing in new laws to divert more waste into recycling rates right across Europe we'll have to rise from the current 50 percent up to 65 percent by 2035 and the materials will have to be genuinely recycled collection figures won't do anymore so it is clear that in the future we're going to see incinerators closing down in Europe because that they're going to have less and less ways to burn and every cycling is going to go up other other countries that have gone the other way have kind of invested in increasing the recycling rather than wise to energy for instance yeah we have examples in Europe where we we are seeing cities actually being a lot more advanced than then Copenhagen with a lot less investment get a lot further like for example Ljubljana the capital of Slovenia was half a million people they don't have an incinerator they are recycling in the order of sixty five percent which is like more than twice as much as Copenhagen with a lot less investment and they're recycling a lot more [Music] heading back to Sweden I wonder if I should have visited a country that's focused on recycling instead I'll be a bit late to ask for a side trip to Slovenia for Australia it's a question of where we invest our money waste-to-energy is an expensive option and one thing has been troubling me about how suitable the Swedish model is for Australia every part I visit talks more about heating than electricity so I've got one final question and I've found the person that can answer it in Australia we don't have the heating capacity we don't have central heating district heating or even district cooling or anything like that does that mean it's less efficient for Australia to invest in waste-to-energy for instance absolutely that is okay so unfortunately if you only used the electricity of course the energy efficiency in the plant will be much lower than what you can find in Sweden and in other parts of the world where you also have district heating so that will make the whole calculation less efficient but still you have to consider what's the alternative it's becoming very clear that incineration is not a one-size-fits-all solution charging a car at a waste-to-energy plant it kind of feels like ah I'm burning trash to make this car move but the reality is a bit more complex than that here in Sweden it's summer now and most of the furnaces have been turned off here and that's because nearly 90 percent of the energy from waste to energy in Sweden is used for heating so what does that mean for Australia are we going to put in cooling systems which can happen but it requires us to dig up all the streets in our cities and put complex sets of pipes taking the cooling to all the houses I don't know if we're the kind of country that's going to do that kind of thing I mean we'd probably end up with something like cooling to the node [Music] none of this bothers the Swedes as they head for their popular Midsummer Festival Sara Richard and the kids have joined the throng to dance like frogs and frolic around the Maypole I always thought it was the cross but then I learned that somebody told me that it's actually an old tradition from the Vikings that we share each facility and so actually it's not across is this huge day that we dance around and celebrate fertility and but I I'm not sure that it's true but that's what everybody says so and I love the idea that's I think it's a beautiful because this is when everything starts growing and so yes it may see as a crazy Swedish tradition that we do this is the height of summer it's a time for snaps and songs before they head into the long bitter winter wear during 18-hour nights with sub-zero temperatures they'll be warmed by burning the nation's waste [Applause] not far from the Maypole on a dancing stock coms herb de lijn waste-to-energy plant chuff's away sitting side-by-side with a recycling yard here it seems like the perfect place to return to that burning question more I've traveled around story and the more I've realized they're very much interconnected waste-to-energy is not just a simple solution to our waste problems if you don't sort out your recycling then basically you're gonna be burning a lot of plastic which is just a low-grade oil at best well done waste to energy can be a step up from landfill but it's still very much at the bottom of the scale and you've got to invest big-time in the recycling and avoiding waste in the first place [Music]

Channel: Journeyman Pictures

Views: 838,155

Rating: 4.405313 out of 5

Keywords: Journeyman, Journeyman Pictures, recycling, waste disposal, rubbish, waste to energy, biofuel, sweden, plastic recycling, environemntal protection, plastic pollution, waste incinerator

Id: caw-969W-D4

Length: 26min 7sec (1567 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 20 2018