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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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