Sweden ranks high on waste sorting

Many Swedish municipalities have introduced the collection of food waste sorting to avoid .. well, waste. 

• 

  Sweden is great at food waste recycling, and the goal is to have 50% of the food waste recycled by 2018.

• Sweden ranks high when it comes to collecting food waste. And since 2004 the biological waste recycling has increased with all of 65%. This is what a report from the trade organization Avfall Sverige shows. In May of 2012, the Swedish government decided that by 2018, 50% of the food waste will be recycled. And the municipalities quickly caught on.
  Today, 170 of the Swedish municipalities have introduced the collection of food waste sorting.

• ”In the long run, we believe all municipalities will have this sort of waste sorting,” says Weine Winqvist, Managing Director at Avfall Sverige. He says that biological waste recycling leads to two things: The energy content in the food waste is taken care of and transformed to vehicle fuel, and secondly the nutrients in the food can be used in agriculture as a fertilizer. This is what sets Sweden apart from many countries in Europe, where they only use the food waste as a fertilizer. Transitioning to biological recycling isn’t particularly hard for the municipalities to do, but it can be somewhat cumbersome. Routines for how the waste is to be collected must be planned, and it takes a lot in terms of training and information in order to get the citizens along. ”But the municipalities learn from each other’s work,” says Winqvist.
  For more info, see www.avfallsverige.se