Stadens sopor indd

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The resource recovery regime, 1900–1927
At the turn of the last century, the quantity and type of refuse pro-
duced by Stockholm’s rising population, human and equine, was 
compounded by increasing consumption. Stockholm already had 
a disposal system that was based on the sale of waste as fertilizer. 
This was concentrated in Lövsta, on Lake Mälaren on the outskirts 
of the capital, where waste was transported from the centre by train 
and from where it could then be shipped to the surrounding coun-
tryside by barge. The city’s refuse managers, however, felt that there 
were major problems with waste disposal, partly because there was 
a growing amount of it (mostly of night soil and horse manure), 
while much of it included greater quantities of non-organic waste, 
which made it less appropriate—and less in demand—as fertilizer. 
In order to find ways to modernize the capital’s waste disposal, Karl 
Tingsten, Lövsta’s manager and later the director of municipal waste 
services, was sent on a study tour of European and North American 
cities. At the time, there was nothing to suggest that Stockholm 
would prioritize one particular method over another. Incineration 
had been considered, and the countries Tingsten expected to learn 
most from were the UK and the US, both of which had long used 
the method. However, Tingsten returned from the trip ready to see 
the city invest in resource recovery by introducing source separation 
in two categories: ‘fertilizer waste’ and ‘non-organic waste’. The lat-
ter category was screened for any material that could be sold. All 
household waste was sorted through from 1907 onwards, but as early 
as 1901 Stockholm’s Refuse Department had begun to divide it into 
fertilizer waste and non-organic waste. Fertilizer sales were relatively 
strong in the first decade of the century. Non-organic waste brought 
in some income, but its sale was not an effective disposal method. 
In practice, the proportion of non-organic waste that was sold was 
marginal; the bulk of it was incinerated in the furnace purchased for 
Lövsta in 1900. Incineration as a method, however, barely featured 
in the statistics and City Council records; it was resource recovery 
that was thought important. The argument for resource recovery 
was that it had a utility value which, if the waste was handled pro-
perly, would translate into commercial value. Waste separation and 

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its subsequent handling were also seen as ‘natural’, according to 
the idea that all waste had a natural condition to which it should 
return: waste suited for use as fertilizer should return to the land, 
other materials to industry. At heart it was an eco-cyclical approach. 
Moreover, there was a notion that waste had an obvious value that 
was driven by its utility value. This vision, shared by Tingsten, can 
be traced to the then common emphasis on thrift. 
The establishment of Stockholm’s resource recovery regime at the 
beginning of the twentieth century can be explained by the fact that 
much of its refuse was suitable for fertilizer and that the regime was 
reinforced by a strong sense of public spiritedness. Then there was 
the inertia of the existing system, with its extensive arrangements 
for collecting and disposing of Stockholm’s refuse which, if only 
the waste was sorted, could continue. The inertia resulted from the 
long-established ideas and practices that governed resource recovery, 
reinforced by the existence of railway infrastructure and a complex 
organization. A change of system would have involved conside-
rable investment, both in terms of capital outlay and in altering 
Stockholm’s waste disposal objectives. Neither was the continued 
use of waste as fertilizer and the increased recovery of other mate-
rials thought out-dated—far from it, it was considered a modern 
form of management—and all the sorting and reuse became a way 
of maintaining the capital’s links to agrarian surroundings. Mean-
while, adapting to modern urban conditions involved dealing with 
more heterogeneous waste in ever greater quantities. 
At the same time as the introduction of the two-way division of 
waste into fertilizer waste and non-organic waste, the collection of 
kitchen waste to be used as pigswill was suggested by the Stock-
holm City Council. The idea was not new—many cities had similar 
operations, including in the US—and shortly before the turn of the 
century Stockholm had seen a less successful attempt of this kind 
when pigs were kept on Lövsta’s large rubbish tip. The pig rearing 
that was discussed as a serious option from 1906 onwards was to be 
run along more organized lines. Kitchen refuse and scraps would 
be collected from individual households and then boiled and sold 
directly to pig farmers or used in the city’s municipal pig farms. 

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The initiative for this came not from the city’s refuse managers but 
from the slaughterhouse industry and the city council department 
that ran the municipal slaughterhouse. The refuse managers were 
against the proposal, because they felt that pigswill collection would 
threaten the key element in the city’s waste management—the sale 
of the largest category of waste as fertilizer. They feared a deterio-
ration in the suitability and value of the refuse as fertilizer, regard-
less of whether there was a three-way split between kitchen waste, 
fertilizer waste, and non-organic waste or a two-way split between 
pigswill and all other refuse. After ten years of inquiries and heated 
debate, pigswill collection was gradually introduced across the city in 
1916–1918. Once in place, the whole of Stockholm followed a three-
way division into pigswill, fertilizer waste, and non-organic waste. 
The process has since been depicted as being a wartime project, but 
my study shows that pigswill collection had a far longer history. 
The idea of feeding scraps to pigs was one element in the resource 
recovery regime, which in society at large reflected a long-standing 
emphasis on the utility value of waste. This is shown by the fact 
that two city departments’ worth of civil servants ended up fighting 
over how the waste’s value might best be realized.
In the 1910s, the demand for fertilizer began to dwindle, which 
made it more difficult for the city to get rid of its refuse. The fall in 
demand became even more apparent in the 1920s, just as the com-
position of the waste was on the verge of an important change. The 
amount of the city’s solid waste had begun to rise after the First 
World War. Once the Stockholm City Council permitted lavatories 
to be connected to the public sewers in 1909, the number of out-
houses had plummeted, and at much the same time horses began to 
vanish from the city, to be replaced by motorized trams and motor 
vehicles. These changes brought with new disposal problems. The 
city began to use the lakeside at Lövsta as a rubbish tip, and when 
poor financial returns and the mass death of pigs in the municipal 
piggeries led to the discontinuation of pigswill collections in 1927, the 
separation into fertilizer waste and non-organic waste also ceased. 
The resource recovery regime, which in practice had been waning 
for most of the 1920s, was now definitely over. 

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