Recycling – a Scandinavian comparison

The work on recycling in the Nordic countries is ongoing and the different countries have slightly different strategies and have come to different lengths depending on the work of governments and APPLiA. This mainly depends on the possibilities with logistics around collection structures, subsidies from authorities and municipalities.

Norway is currently at the forefront of recycling. Norway, which has a large part of its collection via stores, has found it relatively easy to sort out products early in the flow and thus get products that are well suited for recycling. Norway received subsidies early on, such as free premises and wage subsidies. This created an opportunity to build a structure around recycling. Today, the large chains have shop-in-shops in their regular stores for the sale of recycled products. Read more about recycling in Norway here.

Denmark has a strong environmental ambition from the authorities but despite that there are major problems with producer responsibility not being fully respected, according to APPLiA in Denmark. APPLiA wants all municipal collection points to have areas for recycling where individual actors are given the opportunity to recycle and not for the municipality to have a monopoly on recycling shops. In Denmark there is also a very exciting project underway with a reporting module on how much environmental savings recycling and recycling can lead to and how companies can take credit for these. Read more about recycling in Denmark here.

Sweden handles both recycling and reuse within El-Kretsen, which was started jointly by the industries to handle producer responsibility. Within El-Kretsen, work is continuously being done on these issues and there are also a couple of players who have come a long way in recycling. Inrego, which works exclusively with IT products, is probably the company that has come the furthest in Sweden within the sector. There are a few smaller regional players that carry out recycling in the white goods area. Just as in Denmark, the big challenge is to obtain collected material that is in good enough condition to be able to carry out recycling. In Sweden, possibilities are currently being investigated and projects are underway on how recycling can be increased with different types of measures. The majority of the work is done within the APPLiA-part-owned El-Kretsen, read more here.

Recycling is and will continue to be an important parameter in the environmental work of APPLiA's companies. A major question in the environmental work is also whether the sale of used goods via sites such as Blocket should or should be defined as recycling by the authorities and thus included in the statistics.

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