Sweden Is Great at Turning Trash to Energy

Glass bottles wait to be recycled outside a restaurant in Stockholm, Sweden. IAN W. IOTT/GETTY IMAGES

Swedes are world champions when it comes to recycling and waste management. While over half of US waste gets buried at landfills, in Sweden only 0.7 per cent gets dumped this way, and over half of it is recycled, composted or processed, notes HowStuffWorks.

“Recycling (almost) everything is now a social norm in Sweden,” Owen Gaffney, a global sustainability analyst and communicator at Stockholm Resilience Centre and Future Earth, explains in an email. “Local authorities make it easy. Once these norms are embedded in your thinking it actually feels cognitively uncomfortable when you visit another country and can’t find easy ways to recycle. I get recycle anxiety.”

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