Sweden RADICALLY Revolutionizes Composting to Eliminate 98% of Trash
Have you ever taken the "Carbon Footprint Quiz" that tells you how many planets it would take to support life, if everybody on earth lived the way you did? I took it back in college, in an Environmental Urban Planning course, and was SHOCKED to find that my lifestyle choices would require 4 planet earths to sustain life. FOUR EARTHS?!!?!?!?! That's ridiculous, and completely unacceptable.
One of the best ways to cut down on our carbon footprint is to reduce the amount of waste that we produce each week. Luckily, Sweden has taken the reigns to stabilize waste production, and have seen remarkable results. Did you know that less than 1% of Sweden's trash ends up in landfills? They have 32 waste-to-energy plants that incinerates trash; the process of incineration powers turbines and is ultimately converting into electricity which is then re-distributed across the country.
According to an IFLS article, "Amazingly, WTE plants provide close to a million homes with heating and over a quarter of a million homes with electricity. So not only is it reducing the amount of trash that ends up in landfills, but it also helps to reduce Sweden’s reliance on fossil fuels.
A good number to remember is that three tons of waste contains as much energy as one ton of fuel oil… so there is a lot of energy in waste,” Göran Skoglund, spokesperson for Öresundskraft, one of the country’s leading energy companies, explains in the short video below. That means that the two million tons of waste incinerated each year produces around 670,000 tons worth of fuel oil energy. Sweden even helps to clean up other countries in the EU by importing their trash and burning it."
But this isn't ALL that Sweden is doing to eliminate trash. One of the major sources of waste is plastic food packaging; so, two Swedish-based designers have created biodegradable solutions to environmentally unsustainable plastics.
IFLS says, "They launched a project in 2012 entitled This Too Shall Pass that features biodegradable food packaging, some of which doubles as a vessel to cook and serve the food as well.
Food is cooked directly within the self-opening package and—as the name suggests—opens when the food is cooked to a certain temperature. The packaging can easily be composted after use.
The Sustainable Expanding Bowl consists of a cellulose vessel containing freeze-dried food. Adding boiling water not only cooks the food inside, but also causes the packaging to expand and open into a bowl. Tomorrow Machine is also in the early stages of developing new packaging that isn’t used as a serving dish, but is made out of natural materials that are easily compostable or can dissolve in water."
Check out these before and after pictures, courtesy of Tomorrow Machine.
Looks pretty cool, to me!
For more information on how to reduce your carbon footprint, check out these sources:
http://www.iflscience.com/environment/less-1-swedens-trash-ends-landfills
http://www.iflscience.com/environment/meet-next-generation-waste-free-food-packaging
http://footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/calculators/
http://planning.calpoly.edu/planning/content/people/wack
http://www.foodproductiondaily.com/Packaging/Active-and-Intelligent-packaging-Tomorrow-Machine
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