Sweden

The Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment, today elected Ambassador Julio Cordano, of Chile, as the next INC Chair during the third part of the fifth session (INC-5.3).

This paper explores how carbon capture can be integrated into thermal waste treatment plants with minimal energy losses - or even efficiency gains

This pop-up second hand store was part of IKEA's effort to become a circular business by 2030.

18 Member States are at risk of missing one or both of the 2025 targets.

Contrary to current estimates, new research suggests that there is twice as much plastic waste exported to non-OECD countries

Over the last few years, global energy demand has risen, and this trend is expected to continue. Almost all European Union (EU) countries are suffering from a shortage of energy services. Annually, EU fossil fuel energy production falls; for example, in 2014, gas production fell by 11.2% compared to 2013. Energy imports, especially natural gas, have increased as a result of lower energy output. The EU is still heavily reliant on fossil fuel imports (oil and gas), and the cost of EU energy imports in 2017 increased by 26% (€266 billion).

Hospital and medical wastes are disposed in tens of thousands of dedicated incinerators or are autoclaved to destroy pathogens and then landfilled. However, over a hundred cities which have waste to energy (WTE) power plants fueled by municipal solid waste, use these plants to co-combust medical wastes. This report identified forty one such plants, located in a dozen nations, which in total co-combust about 90,000 tons of medical waste annually. The medical waste represented an average of 2.4% of the total amount of wastes combusted in these WTE power plants. Generally, the medical wastes are collected at the point of origin in puncture resistant, leakproof and sealed containers which are transported to WTE plants and are mechanically conveyed to the WTE furnace.

The world's first automated textile sorting system on an industrial scale is being built by the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute together with 20 partners. The system, in which various types of textile can be identified with optical sensors, is due to go into operation in summer 2020 next to an existing recycling center in Malmö in southern Sweden.

In July the government presented its plan for a long-term and sustainable transition for society. Waste Sweden welcomes the strategy but believes that other tools are needed for real change. At the heart of the strategy is a vision: "A society in which resources are effectively used in non-toxic, closed-cycle streams, replacing re-diluent materials".

This Outlook can help decision-makers understand the direction in which we are heading and help to assess which policies can support a more circular economy. The OECD stands ready to assist governments in making this transition by designing, developing and delivering better resource efficiency policies for better lives.

Published today, European Environment Agency’s (EEA) updated European city air quality viewer shows that people in Uppsala and Umeå, Sweden, and Faro, Portugal, can enjoy the cleanest city air in Europe.

A report by Ecologic Institute and Climact shows that the draft National Energy and Climate Plans presented by governments at the start of 2019 are in acute need of improvement. They suffer from inadequate targets and insufficient details on the policies and financing needed to move towards net-zero emission economies in Europe. Member States also need to do better in involving their national stakeholders in providing input to the plans, to benefit from their expertise and to get them on board for future policies. Good practice examples exist around the EU to serve as inspiration for the final plans due by the end of the year.

No single technology is the best choice for handling fire side fouling of heat transfer surfaces, catalyst surfaces etc. Cleaning technologies available on the market include steam soot-blowing, shot cleaning, explosion cleaning, water cannons, sonic cleaning, air pulse cleaning, rapping etc.

Waste Management International - Impressions over the past few years, send to us by ForumZ Partners!

Several approaches to machine learning algorithms for the analysis of LIBS data collected from scrap pieces on conveyor belt have been tested.

6^th IBBA workshop on the topic of biogas branding

Geminor has won a new contract to supply more than 27,000 tonnes of RDF to the Renova energy from waste (EFW) facility in Gothenburg. The 12-month agreement, which commences in January 2018, is the latest in a long line of contract wins for the European secondary fuels specialist.

Global energy transition taking up speed - but no country is doing enough / Countries have to strengthen targets and implementation / Sweden, Lithuania, Morocco and Norway leading the table - USA in free fall

This Study to assess the implementation by EU Member States of certain provisions of Directive 1999/31/EC on the landfill of waste, carried out for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Environment (DG Environment), investigates the situation in the 28 Member States of the European Union (EU) as regards the landfilling of untreated non-hazardous municipal solid waste.

Separate collection of organics is a key part of schemes to achieve highest rates of recovery of materials. Also, it allows recovery of clean organic resources, which are then suitable for application onto farmlands, thereby causing multiple beneficial effects as - locking C in soils (which helps tackling climate change) - fighting desertification and erosion - reducing use of mineral fertilisers (and eutrophication that may occur in sensitive areas and wetlands) - preventing pathogens thanks to the suppressive power (which reduces use of pesticides), etc.

In Sweden and Finland, consideration of the German Energiewende is often reduced to the nuclear phase-out decision. It is precisely in the field of nuclear energy that the two Nordic countries and Germany have ended on different paths. This article charts the historical development of nuclear power in both Sweden and Finland in order to explain why they did not follow Germany in its post-Fukushima decision and whether changes in their respective positions are to be expected.

This article offers a survey of the legal and regulatory issues associated with carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects in the eight Arctic states. It comprises five parts, offering some introductory notes, a very brief insight into CCS, assessing each jurisdiction in terms of sources and sequestration geology and current or proposed CCS projects, providing an account of relevant rules, and finishing with brief conclusions. Because CCS is a costly technology, and, moreover, can only be implemented where there are large point-source final emitters and favorable storage geology, CCS projects in Arctic states will cluster around a limited number of industrial locations which will include oil and gas production facilities and large mining and mineral processing facilities that also have suitable storage targets close at hand. In addition to suitable emissions sources and geological targets and appropriate economic incentives, proponents of CCS projects and the public also need the assurance of an appropriate legal and regulatory regime. Such regimes have been slow to develop in Arctic states, although adoption of the European Union’s CCS Directive and the need for its transposition in the EU Member States and possibly in the EEA states has arguably created some momentum.

On 2 March 2010 the European Commission authorised the cultivation of a BASF’s genetically modified potato “Amflora” throughout the European Union. This came after a tortuous process commenced in 1996 and so far it is the only authorisation of a GMO for cultivation in EU since the current regulation was established. On 3 March 2010, President Barroso announced that the Commission intends to propose amendments to the current regulation to allow the Member States to prohibit the cultivation of GMO authorised for cultivation in the EU and it did so on June 13, 2010. This is one of the very few cases where decision-making power is effectively devolved back from Union to state level; it is even more impressive that this is happening on the initiative of the Commission and despite the obvious negative consequences for the internal market. In the meantime BASF botched the 2011 growing season for Amflora in Sweden and in 2012 announced that it withdraws its GM crops from the EU. This article follows the saga purports to find the reasons why it entailed an immediate change.

Swedish Waste Management Association has set up a voluntary agreement for control of methane emissions frombiogas and upgrading plants, starting in the year 2007. There were a number of reasons to start this system, mainlyenvironmental (GHG emissions and odour), economical and safety issues, but as important was to show that the biogasindustry acts responsibly and is pro-active regarding these issues, especially in relation to authorities. The voluntaryagreement system has been reviewed once and is currently set up in two parts; internal routines for leak detection andemission measurements performed every 3 years by an external consultant. Further Authors: H. Hellström - SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden A. Blom - Swedish Waste Management Association

Home composting is a wide-spread treatment option for biological household waste in Sweden. According to theSwedish Waste Management association (Avfall Sverige, 2011), 60 000 tonnes of compostable waste were homecomposted in 2010. This represents a rather large portion (10 %) of all the household waste treated biologically.Nevertheless, research on process efficiency and environmental effects of home composting is scarce. The objective ofthis study was to investigate the influence of different process parameters on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions(methane, CH4, nitrous oxide, N2O and carbon dioxide, CO2) from home composting under real householdmanagement. Further Authors: Alexander Johansson - Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Björn Kempe - Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences