Stadens sopor indd

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The incineration regime, 1938–1975 
The end of waste separation came without any discussion in the 
Stockholm City Council. In the 1920s, in the run-up to the deci-
sion, incineration had been suggested as the solution to the capital’s 
waste disposal problem, and in the 1930s it became the option of 
choice, yet it was not the obvious alternative. After all, this was a 
time when many British cities stopped incinerating their refuse and 
went over to a more systematic landfill practice known as ‘controlled 
tipping’, a cheaper method than incineration, as it did not incur any 
significant initial costs provided there was suitable land available. In 
Stockholm, however, controlled tipping was contemplated, but was 
dismissed as being less interesting. One reason was that the land 
at Lövsta where it would have been possible was expected to last 
for no more than 16 years’ tipping. Incineration was said to offer 
a longer-term solution, added to which Stockholm’s refuse, which 
contained a great deal of paper, was well suited to the method. 
Another reason was the desire to modernize waste disposal, and 
this was felt to equate to the introduction of incineration. There 
was much about the arguments in favour of incineration that can 
be linked to functionalism, with its emphasis on rationalization 
and the emergence of the modern city. Incineration was presented 
as a comprehensive solution for all waste, and one that involved less 
manual labour. Waste incineration can thus be seen as a parallel to 
the arrival of rubbish chutes in apartment buildings, which happened 
at much the same time: refuse would quickly, easily, and invisibly be 
removed from its source, and then destroyed in an equally efficient 
manner. In this approach, its worth was an irrelevancy. Waste was 
seen instead as an aesthetic liability. 
In 1938, a large, three-furnace incinerator was built at Lövsta—
Sweden’s first modern incineration plant for municipal waste. With 
that, given the debate that had long seen it as the best disposal 
option, Stockholm can be said to have gone over to a waste incine-
ration regime. There was still some resource recovery, but largely 
in order to facilitate incineration. From 1940 onwards, the waste 
heat produced by the incineration process was also put to use. This 
had in fact been investigated at the planning stage, but in the end 

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it was decided that it would not be a worthwhile exercise; however, 
following the fuel shortage that hit Stockholm in the Second World 
War, a steam turbine was installed so that the plant could produce 
steam and electricity for businesses in Lövsta. 
The Second World War saw a temporary halt in the rising con-
sumption and development of everyday technology that had started 
back in the 1920s. Consumer research has shown that the major 
breakthrough for packaged consumer goods came at the end of the 
1930s. Between 1930 and 1950, retail sales volumes increased by 70 
per cent and food sales doubled. Supermarkets, self-service shops, 
and new products added to the increasing quantities of packaging 
in circulation, at first mainly paper packaging. Then there were new 
disposable products, while the ever-larger quantities of newsprint in 
circulation, which had started to rise in the late nineteenth century, 
showed no sign of abating. All these changes resulted in an increasing 
amount of refuse. In 1954 the city built a fourth furnace at Lövsta, 
yet the incineration plant’s capacity was still inadequate to the task 
of dealing with the mounting waste problem. Moreover, by the late 
1950s the city’s waste managers were facing a new problem. Human 
excrement, which with the advent of flushing lavatories and muni-
cipal domestic sewage had ceased to be a concern for the city’s road 
department (which since 1929 handled the city’s sanitation), now 
returned to the agenda in the shape of sewage sludge: the steadily 
declining water quality around Stockholm had hastened the intro-
duction of water treatment plants, which produced large amounts 
of sewage sludge that somehow had to be managed. 
In 1958 a commission of inquiry was appointed to consider 
increased incineration. Initially, a second large incineration plant 
was planned that would have been able to burn sewage sludge. 
Because of transportation issues, the City Council had been thin-
king of building the new plant in the southern suburbs instead of 
at Lövsta; for the same reason, it did not want the plant to be too 
far from the city. The possible location became the subject of much 
debate and was criticized by city politicians, who were swayed by 
NIMBY-like considerations (Not In My Back Yard). In 1963, how-
ever, the choice fell on Högdalen, an area in Stockholm where the 

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city already had two vast tips of demolition waste left from the wave 
of urban reconstruction in the 1950s. While the new incineration 
plant was being planned, Lövsta added a fifth furnace in order to 
cope with the mounting quantities of waste produced by the capital.
During the 1960s, environmental issues began to be discussed 
in more than aesthetic or purely health-related terms. A geocentric 
environmental critique took shape, and this too touched on the 
question of waste. In Stockholm, the City Council first arrived at 
this point in its discussions about the sewage sludge from the city’s 
water treatment plants. Pending the results of the 1958 inquiry, the 
sludge had simply been dumped in the Baltic and the Atlantic. 
When this was criticized in the late 1950s by the Communist Party, 
who argued for an eco-cyclical approach and said that the waste 
should be used for fertilizer, they were derided; but just a few years 
later there was a volte-face, and the City Council duly decided 
that the best answer was to use the sludge as fertilizer. (However, 
turning it into fertilizer was not a straightforward business, added 
to which there were problems finding buyers for the end product.) 
In the late 1960s, the eco-cyclical approach was also applied in the 
case of other forms of waste. City representatives went to see how 
things were done at composting plants in Denmark, for example. 
In addition to this eco-cyclical thinking, there was a social critique 
that emphasized the negative consequences of consumer society. 
While these ideas took hold in the City Council, planning con-
tinued for the new incinerator in Högdalen. Initially, it was not 
intended that the plant be fitted with technology to capture the waste 
heat, but the new environmental debate left its mark on this choice. 
Högdalen was planned to be modern in the sense that the amount 
of air pollution would be minimized. One of the possible methods 
to clean particulates and gases from the incinerator emissions lent 
itself well to being combined with the steam turbine equipment 
for power generation. Such a solution was chosen for Högdalen, 
which was completed in 1970—and thus it was not primarily a 
question of capitalizing on the value of incineration’s byproducts 
that led to the new facility being equipped with the technology to 
capture waste heat.

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