Trash talking: Viking neighbours lock horns in garbage price row

Norway and Sweden are locked in a war of words over dozens of lorries which cross the border each day carrying loads of precious cargo: rubbish. Norway, which sends tonnes of household waste hundreds of miles across the country to be incinerated in Sweden, accuses its neighbor of driving down disposal prices. That is damaging its own efforts to be eco-friendly, reducing the amount people recycle because it is cheaper to burn it and driving up emissions from the lorries which transport it.

Beer and tobacco aren’t the only things that are cheaper in Sweden. Waste management is also cheaper over there

Odd Terje Dovik, Norwegian incineration company boss

The problem arises because Sweden is conscientious when it comes to recycling its waste and doesn’t have enough garbage for its incineration centres, which produce electricity for 250,000 homes and heat for another 950,000. It has to import about 2 million tonnes of waste a year, mostly from Norway but also from Britain, the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark and Ireland. But Odd Terje Dovik, head of the Returkraft incineration centre in the southern Norwegian town of Kristiansand, said: “It has become so advantageous to burn waste in Sweden that the incentive to sort and recycle in Norway is eroding, so much so that the statistics are going in the wrong direction.”

It’s like a market. Transporting waste from countries to other countries is a business driven by the balance of supply and demand

Weine Wiqvist, head of the Swedish Waste Management and Recycling Association

Europe