What Sweden can teach Scotland about recycling our waste

The cliche - as cliches often do - has some truth to it. 

Thunberg, still only 21, has influence well beyond her years and her nation’s borders as she fights against in-action on the climate emergency.

A town council really did teach birds to hunt down cigarette waste. And some joggers in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo actually do stoop to scoop up street trash. 

But Sweden’s left is out of office, replaced, in 2022, by a centre-right alliance with an uncomfortable and controversial supply and confidence agreement with hard-right populists who have only just u-turned to support net zero efforts.

And the country still has its litter, not least plastic packaging and bottles in its rivers, harbours and canals. 

“We did national monitoring -  two years ago now - and in that one week, we found 35 million pieces of litter,” Johanna Ragnartz, chief executive of Håll Sverige Rent, or Keep Sweden Tidy, told The Herald on Sunday. “So I guess we are as dirty as any West European country that has a decent system. We are no better, no worse. I think we have a pretty good system to take care of rubbish. But I don't think our behaviour is better than anyone else’s.”

Sweden faces exactly the same culture of mass consumption as the rest of Europe and the developed world. Rich Swedes generate a lot of trash.

The use of plastic packaging, Ragnartz, has been “booming since middle of the 80s”

“I'm not seeing any predictions of that stopping,” she added. “On the contrary, even plastic packaging, so much in the focus, is just continuing to grow; unfortunately, for our sake.”

So what do Sweden do with all the rubbish it creates? Very little - perhaps one per cent - ends up in landfill. More is burned, to fuel energy-from-waste plants. Sweden even imports Norwegian rubbish to keep warm. And lots  - far more than in Scotland - is recycled and re-used.

Aside from plogging and craws that collect cigarette butts, Sweden has developed “sexy” litter bins that flirt with people who use them. “Oooooh, yeah, right there,” a recorded voice says when you insert rubbish through a slot in Malmo. 

When she mentions a “good system”, Ragnartz is not talking about fun and stories about these sometimes gimmicky Swedish policies that make headlines overseas. 

No, Ragnatz is explaining a variety of more important if mundane policies - often known by their abbreviations - that have shifted the cost of handling trash from the public purse. 

So, the very long established DRS, or Deposit Return Scheme, and Extended Producer Responsibility or EPR. 

The latter - in place in Sweden for decades - is when manufacturers cover the cost of collecting and recycling their products or their packaging. Crudely, this is tax that polluters pay. It is designed to incentivise corporates to generate less waste.

The UK is following suit, albeit with delays. Tories at Westminster before they called their election aimed to have an EPR scheme for packaging up and running by next year. 

As things stand, this British system would not raise any revenue for street-sweeping, litter-picking or anti-littering campaigns. 

Campaigners, including Keep Scotland Beautiful, want to change that. Devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are toying with the idea.

Sweden has already adopted it.

“It's really difficult to compare litter between countries,” said Ragnartz.  “I mean, it’s dependent on cleaning-up, on how much you invest in cleaning-up.”

Right now councils get money from manufacturers to collect and recycle rubbish. 

“EPR's been in place since the 90s. The purpose is to make producers responsible for the product or the packaging all through the lifecycle.”

Until recently this funding stream was focused on what happens to rubbish generated at home, on paying for what Swedish householders throw in their bins. 

This has been “working well”, said Ragnartz. Recycling rates run between 60 and 90 per cent for various kinds of materials. 

What is new is an EPR for litter. In other words, producers are expected to help pay for the packaging people put in their bins - and the packaging they dump in the street.

Firms have to pay two litter levies. The first is a small fee to help administer the scheme. 

The second depends on how much of their packaging is found in litter streams. And that depends on accurate surveys from local authorities.

How has this gone down with business? 

‘Of course, there's always some opposition to new regulations, mainly from the small producers,” said Ragnartz. “But we have had a big debate on the litter problem. And this has been a big help to overcome opposition - because no one wants to have this situation.”

Bigger firms - especially big brands - often seem to be keener to be seen to be greener. Global fizzy drink brands do not have much to gain from their plastic bottles bobbling down streams in to the sea. 

Marketing chiefs at big burger chains are not chuffed by social or mainstream media pictures of their packaging shoved in to hedges.

Various other countries are exploring litter EPR schemes, sometimes to tackle specific plastic problems, such as cigarette butts or fishing nets.

Multinationals are used to dealing with environmental regulations across Europe and tend not to get phased by the demands of individual governments. 

After all policies like EPR for litter at least partly stem from yet another abbreviation: SUPD, the European Union’s Single-Use Plastic Directive of 2019. 

Various other countries are exploring litter EPR schemes, sometimes to tackle specific plastic problems, such as cigarette butts or fishing nets.

So big firms are dealing with a broad strategic framework on handling plastic waste that covers almost the entire continent.

Smaller firms - especially those who only work in one nation - can get antsier about regulation, about what they will see as a tax, rather than the state recouping the cost of cleaning up their mess.

This is what happened in Scotland with DRS - “ancient history” in Sweden, jokes Ragnartz - when small manufacturers in particular objected to the scheme. Will EPR for litter play out the same way?

Ragnartz has some particular advice for Scotland. “The EPR scheme is brilliant and of course you should implement it,” she said. “It is going in the right way. But do not rely on regulation. You always need to work on public education and campaigning.”