Trash Planet

We may bury ourselves in garbage before the apocalypse arrives.

Photo by Pop & Zebra on Unsplash

In 2020, people generated about 2.24 billion tons of solid waste, amounting to a footprint of 0.79 kilograms per person per day. By 2050, this is estimated to reach about 3.88 billion tons.

Most of this trash comes from the developed world. Let’s take a look at a few charts from our friends at Statistica.

The United States and China are far and away the world leaders in producing solid waste, with Germany in third place far, far behind. But as was the case when looking at CO2 statistics, it is the per capita numbers that are more telling.

Unsurprisingly, the developed world dominates the trash producers list. Interestingly enough, there is a pretty developed European country that you don’t see on that list.

Sweden.

Here is how Sweden does it.

About 60% of the world’s waste ends up in landfills. In Sweden, that number is about 1%.

How did this happen? The government and the people of Sweden made sustainability a priority, though not all of the treatment of waste is clean.

One of the most important parts of the process was passing laws that made producers responsible for the costs associated with the collection and disposal of the goods they sell. This is not the case in most other developed nations. Households in Sweden are charged for the waste they produce by its weight, which incentivizes recycling. Furthermore, nothing that can be composted or incinerated is allowed in the trash. Sweden also has built a mindboggling amount of waste collection stations, with such a waste collection station within 300 meters of all residential areas. Sweden has gotten so good at processing trash, that it imports about 800,000 tons of waste from the UK, Norway, Italy, and Ireland. These plants supply about 1.5 million households in Sweden (about 15% of the population) with heat and electricity.

The dirty little secret.

The dirty little secret of Sweden’s sustainability miracle is that the miracle is, well, dirty.

What cannot be recycled, is used for energy. Sweden burns about half of its trash to produce energy.  

Each ton of the waste incinerated releases about 0.7 and 1.7 tons of CO2, so there is no free lunch here. Research shows that about half of the materials incinerated could have been recycled or composted. The Energy Justice Network posits that burning trash produces more CO2 than coal. They note that to make the same amount of energy as a coal power plant, trash incinerators in 2018 released 65% more CO2, and more of other harmful gases than would burning an equivalent amount of coal.

So Sweden gets credit for their dogged recycling and reusing economy, but the burning of trash may not be the solution they think it is.

So what is the answer?

As is often the case the answer is money. I recently took a trip to our local recycling center and was quite impressed by the amount of things that were recycled there. Everything from plastic trash bags, glass, any kind of metal, and some plastics were recycled there. But it is a relatively small recycling center in a mid-sized American town where most of the people in that town don't even know of its existence. There is a similar recycling center planned on the other side of town in the coming years.

If my town adopted the zealous recycling and composting practices of Sweden, we'd be well on our way it's making huge improvements in our waste problem. But we aren't.

The second recycling center will help, but it can only do so much if no one knows about it, and no one wants to pay to have similar centers set up all around the country and the world where they're needed.

Waste management and recycling is often a luxury of rich countries, and even then it is done quite poorly.

Waste in poorer countries.

In low-income countries, it is estimated that over 90% of waste is disposed of in unregulated dumps or openly burned. This of course leads to a number of sub-optimal health outcomes in these countries.

As these countries typically produce much less waste than the developed world, the cost of implementing better trash management and recycling programs is very low compared to the cost of such programs in the developed world. But that cost is still often too high.

Landfills are a huge part of the emissions problem, particularly when it comes to methane. According to a report by the International Solid Waste Association, about 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions will come from the world’s landfills by 2025. 

Keeping materials out of landfills is key. Burning it for energy isn’t a great solution.

This is where I say “degrowth is the answer” because a society that uses less, will waste less. But we also need to recycle and reuse more of what we can. We need to ramp up the circular economy – reusing items more. But this number is going in the wrong direction. The Circle Economy Foundation recently reported that global circularity (reusing materials) dropped from 9.1% to 7.2% over the past six years.

The Swedish system, where companies must help pay for the waste they create, and where recycling and reuse are made easier, and creating trash costs a lot more – is a good start.

But the money has to be there to build these systems and to maintain them. This goes for both developed and developing nations. Where is that money going to come from? Probably higher taxes.

You get what you pay for. Managing our trash so it doesn’t consume us is expensive. Suffocating under its weight is free.