What happens to our rubbish, and how much is recycled?

In 1898 Stockholm's rubbish was taken by rail out to Lövsta and unloaded on an embankment above an enclosure.⁸ Below the embankment, about a hundred pigs grazed on the heap.⁸ The food waste became feed, and the feed became food again. It was a circular economy before the term existed, and it was not pleasant.

This article follows what happens to our rubbish today, and works out how much actually becomes new material. What waste incineration gives back in the form of electricity and heat is counted in S4:E1 Clean Energy.

The order the law sets

The Swedish Environmental Code (Miljöbalken) sets out the order in which waste must be treated. Whoever is responsible for the treatment must first prepare the waste for reuse, second recycle it as material, third recover it in some other way, and last of all dispose of it.⁹ The step before those four, preventing the waste from arising at all, comes earlier in the same code.⁹

Two definitions from the legal text make the rest of the article precise. To recycle waste as material means to reprocess it into new substances or objects that are not to be used as fuel or as filling material.⁹ So incineration is by definition not material recycling, however much energy is recovered. Reuse means that a product that is not waste is used again for the same purpose.⁹ Passing on a working chair is reuse. Grinding it down into chipboard is material recycling.

Two figures, forty times apart

Municipal waste and total waste

The figure most people recognise is municipal waste. Sweden generated 428 kilos per inhabitant in 2024.² The category is wider than the household rubbish bag and includes, among other things, sorted waste and similar waste from businesses.^{2, 9}

The figure almost nobody mentions is total waste. In 2024, 181,521,400 tonnes of waste arose in Sweden, that is 17.1 tonnes per inhabitant.^{1, 7} Municipal waste is about 2.5% of the total amount of waste.^{1, 2}

Mining waste dominates both tables

The difference is mostly rock. The mining and quarrying sector produced 139,301,000 tonnes, that is 76.7% of all waste in the country, and nearly all of it is waste rock and tailings that are stored in tailings ponds and on waste rock heaps at the mine.¹ Construction came second with 16,279,000 tonnes.¹

For the country as a whole the picture looks completely different. Of the 180,479,400 tonnes of waste treated in 2024, 37.3% went to landfill and 33.6% to other disposal.¹ Conventional material recycling accounted for 2.4% and incineration with energy recovery for 4.6.¹

That table looks like a failure and is in practice a description of mining. In the category of other disposal, too, 60,551,000 of 60,561,000 tonnes were mineral waste.¹

Nearly everything that goes to landfill is rock

Of the waste treated in Sweden in 2024, 67,407,000 tonnes went to landfill, that is more than a third.¹ That sounds like a failing grade for Swedish waste management, and it is not.

Of the 67,407,000 tonnes, 67,015,000 tonnes were mineral waste, that is 99.4%.¹ The non-mineral waste that went to landfill was 392,000 tonnes, about 37 kilos per inhabitant per year.^{1, 7} In practice none of the municipal waste goes to landfill: Eurostat gives 3 kilos per inhabitant for Sweden in 2024 in the category of landfill and other disposal, against 110 kilos in the EU as a whole.⁵

So Sweden sends more than a third of its waste to landfill counted by weight, nearly all of it is rock from the mines, and three kilos of municipal waste per person per year goes to landfill.^{1, 5}

Where municipal waste goes

For municipal waste there is a complete flow. Of the 4,535,000 tonnes treated in 2024, 46.7% went to material recycling or preparation for reuse, that is about 2,118,000 tonnes.² 52.6%, about 2,385,000 tonnes, went to energy recovery, and 0.7% to other treatment.²

So just under half of municipal waste becomes new material and just over half becomes district heating and electricity.² Where that electricity goes is counted in the first episode in this area.

Collected is not recycled

Almost every conversation about recycling mixes up two things: putting something in the right bin, and the material actually becoming new material. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency's (Naturvårdsverket) flow chart for 2024 makes the difference measurable, and wood is the clearest proof.²

All separately collected wood waste in the municipal flow in 2024, that is 123,000 tonnes, went to energy recovery.² Zero tonnes were recycled as material. The collection rate was one hundred per cent and the material recycling rate zero.²

The same gap exists in milder form everywhere. Electrical equipment was collected at 95.8% and recycled as material at 72.0.² Batteries 95.8 and 79.2% respectively. Plastic 51.4 and 31.1 respectively. Food waste 54.1 and 50.4 respectively. Garden and park waste 89.6 and 54.3 respectively.² The gap is smallest for glass: 86.4% collected and 82.6% recycled as material.²

Glass also shows why the material matters. Glass is uniform, is sorted into two colours and is melted down into new glass.^{3, 10} Plastic is not one single material but a family of materials, and the EU calculation rule requires it to be separated by polymer before it counts as recycled.³

Textiles are the biggest gap. In 2024, 72,000 tonnes of textile waste arose and 18,000 tonnes were collected separately.² The requirement for separate collection of textiles came in on 1 Jan 2025 and so does not show in that year's figures.^{6, 11}

When the figure is 99%, the denominator is wrong

In 2024, 99% of the paper packaging and 98% of the glass packaging placed on the Swedish market was recycled as material.² That sounds like a perfect system.

The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency itself writes that it is more of a warning sign. A material recycling rate close to one hundred per cent suggests that the reported amount placed on the market is underestimated, since both glass and paper also end up in the residual waste that goes to incineration.² One cause the agency points to is producers who do not report what they place on the market.²

The proof is in the same table. 229,447 tonnes of glass packaging were collected in 2024, while only 222,064 tonnes were reported as placed on the market.² More was collected than was sold. For paper, the result is a negative figure in the agency's own table, that is minus 7,550 tonnes of paper packaging in residual waste.²

The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency therefore adjusts the amount placed on the market upwards using waste composition analyses. Glass then falls from 98 to 83%, paper from 99 to 82, and the total from 76 to 66.² The agency adds that even the adjusted figures are probably underestimated.²

The caveat applies to these figures and not to recycling measures in general. For glass and paper packaging in 2024, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency warns that the reported amount placed on the market may be underestimated, which can make the calculated recycling rates too high.² The agency that publishes the figure says so itself.

The method that changed in 2020

The material recycling rate reported for plastic packaging in Sweden was 53.2% in 2019.¹² Two years later it was 23.8%.¹² The change of method means that the recycling rates before and after the change cannot be compared directly.

Where recycling is measured

The method changed. The Commission's implementing decision of 7 Jun 2019 established that, as a main rule, material recycling is to be measured at the point where the waste enters the recycling operation itself, not when it is collected.³ The decision applies from the reference year 2020.^{2, 3}

The calculation points are strikingly concrete. Glass counts when the sorted glass enters a glass furnace, metal when it enters a smelter, paper when it enters a pulping process, plastic when it has been separated by polymer and goes on to pelletising or moulding, and wood when it goes to chipboard production or composting.³ Everything that drops out between the bin and the furnace is therefore not counted.

The effects of the change

The result is that figures from before 2020 and figures from 2020 onwards must never be put in the same time series without the break being spelled out. Statistics Sweden (SCB) has solved this by putting the statistics in three separate tables.¹³

The same decision contains a twist worth knowing about. Metal separated from the bottom ash after incineration may be counted as recycled as material, using a special method.³ That explains why metal is the only type of material in the municipal flow chart where the amount recycled, 179,000 tonnes, is larger than the amount collected separately, 172,000 tonnes.²

How far the circle closes

Everything above is about waste. The question in the episode's title is about something bigger: how much of the material that society uses comes from material that has already been in circulation.

A country that sends three kilos of municipal waste per person per year to landfill, and that collects 86% of its glass, still takes about nine tenths of the material it uses from new extraction.^{2, 4, 5} Counted per inhabitant, Sweden uses about 22.8 tonnes of material a year.¹⁴

The difference between the two pictures is not a contradiction. Waste statistics measure what happens to what has already become waste. The circular material use rate in the economy measures how large a share of the whole material flow that waste makes up, and that flow is dominated by building materials, ore, sand, gravel and biomass, which are not recycled to the same extent as glass jars.

What the figures do not say

Four years' worth of figures are in circulation at the same time. The figures for 2024 have only been in the statistical database since 15 Jun 2026, while the agency's own summary pages still describe 2022, when the total was about 164 million tonnes.^{1, 15, 16} Mixing the two up is the easiest source of error in the subject.

There is a second break in method in municipal waste, where the material recycling rate went from 39 to 47% between 2023 and 2024 because of changed reporting and not only because of changed behaviour.²

And waste generated and waste treated are two different measurements that the agency itself advises against comparing directly, since waste can be stored, imported and exported between the two points.¹⁷

All the episodes in this area are on Season 4, Climate & Resource Scarcity.

What to take away

In 2024, 428 kilos of municipal waste per inhabitant arose, and of the municipal waste treated, 46.7% went to material recycling and 52.6% to energy recovery.² At the same time, 181,521,400 tonnes of waste arose in the whole country, with mining and quarrying accounting for 76.7%.¹ The structure explains why 10.4% of the material flow in 2024 came from material that had already been in circulation: the flow is dominated by ore, sand, gravel, building materials and biomass, and the EU only counts material recycling when the waste enters the recycling operation.^{3, 4} Follow the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency's statistics sheet on municipal waste, the Statistics Sweden and Swedish Environmental Protection Agency tables on waste generated and treated, and Eurostat's measure, the circular material use rate.^{1, 2, 4}

Education, not advice.