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The amount of waste produced by Stockholm had nearly tripled 
between 1922, when it was at its lowest levels, and the mid-1960s. 
The late 1960s then saw an even more dramatic increase, as the 
amount of packaging continued to rise and the plastic content of 
the waste increased. PVC plastic posed a major problem, since when 
incinerated it formed hydrochloric acid that corroded the masonry 
in the chimney stacks. Another type of waste also increased: bulky 
solid waste from private households. Thereafter the quantity of waste 
produced declined in the 1970s as the capital’s population fell, while 
the city now had two incinerators; however, the refuse problem 
was far from being solved. The air pollution from the incinerators 
was criticized by the public and some politicians. Pollutants were 
measured, and people demanded that better scrubbers be installed. 
Both Lövsta and Högdalen were rebuilt with this in mind. It was 
pointed out, though, that the technology to clean the emissions of 
gases and heavy metals was complex, undeveloped, and expensive. 
Criticism of the incinerators’ air pollution did not mean that inci-
neration per se came under attack, of course.
A major problem that was also linked to the environment was the 
domestic and industrial hazardous waste that was first recognized 
as an issue in the late 1960s. Above all, industrial waste was seen as 
particularly worrying, as 90 per cent of its handling and disposal 
was an unknown quantity, at least to the municipality. In several 
instances in the first half of the 1970s, the City Council discus-
sed increased regulation and a more environmentally appropriate 
handling of this waste. There was a consensus that recycling was 
the best method of disposal.
Recycling also began to be discussed—and implemented—when 
it came to other types of waste, above all household waste in the 
form of newsprint and packaging. The City Council established a 
number of collection points where households were able to throw 
away paper, glass, and metal, but only a minute proportion of the 
city’s total waste was recycled in this way. Of greater importance 
was a newspaper recycling trial in municipal-run properties. Recy-
cling was also discussed at the national level, and was first adopted 
as a waste management goal in a parliamentary Bill in 1975. With 

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a new-found interest in resource recovery, the utility value of refuse 
once again became topical. However, it was not thought likely that 
any utility value would translate into a significant commercial value, 
to the extent that it was assumed that recycling for the most part 
would cost the City Council more than it earned from it; instead, 
recycling was justified using arguments taken from the brand of 
environmentalism that emphasized the Earth’s limited resources. 
The recycling cause gained momentum following the 1973 oil cri-
sis, when the idea of using the heat from Högdalen’s incinerator in 
Stockholm’s district heating network was first mooted. This came 
about, but for reasons that long predated the oil crisis and were not 
motivated by the world’s finite resources, but rather by the failure 
of the capital’s energy distribution system. As of 1963, Stockholm 
had a nuclear-powered district heating power plant, which provided 
the south of the city with heat. The reactor had been expensive to 
build, and oil prices in the 1960s were so low that the city began 
to feel that it was a white elephant. As early as 1969, those in the 
municipal administration responsible for energy issues had begun to 
consider decommissioning the reactor and converting the existing 
waste incinerator at Högdalen into a district heating power plant. 
When the decision came to use Högdalen’s waste heat in the district 
heating system, it was not primarily a matter of disposal, or indeed 
an environmental issue—something city politicians were otherwise 
careful to stress when it came to waste management. 
The environmental concerns that were to become a significant 
factor in waste disposal in the 1970s were of a very different kind, 
as their impact was hedged about by formal institutions and regula-
tions, while at the same time the more radical solutions were aban-
doned. Much like the wider issue of the environment, waste disposal 
became strongly compartmentalized, and the various types of waste 
and waste disposal were seen as very different problems with diffe-
rent solutions. This move was the opposite to what had been done 
in the early 1930s when the incineration regime was established by 
in effect combining waste categories. The differentiation between 
various areas of concern regarding waste disposal also reflected a 

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more pragmatic stance that came closer to actual implementation 
than did the late 1960s visions of eco-cycle-based disposal.
Regime shifts
There are no hard and fast explanations why a particular type of 
waste management regime takes shape or why it evolves as it does. 
Here I emphasize the quantity and composition of one city’s waste 
as a possible explanation for changes in an urban waste management 
regime. The quantity and nature of the refuse limits the types of 
disposal technology that are possible. Its composition largely deter-
mined the type of any resource recovery regime and its implementa-
tion (in Stockholm, a large amount of suitable waste was necessary 
for a strategy based on fertilizer sales, for example), but was not as 
significant once an incineration regime was in place. Ideas about 
modernity and the environment were far more important. Regarding 
both regimes—resource recovery and incineration—I hold inertia as 
an important factor in the modification, expansion, or complemen-
ting of the various existing practices at the cost of the introduction 
of new methods. I would argue that inertia was equally evident in 
specific notions of waste, which of course were strongly linked to 
broader notions of the economy, modernity, and the environment. 
The notion of waste as an asset or a liability is crucial to every 
waste management regime, and plays a role in how it is managed 
on the ground. Stockholm’s resource recovery regime had emphasi-
zed the utility value of waste, and it appears that those responsible 
for refuse collection took for granted that this would translate into 
a commercial value, yet in the event this was something the city 
struggled to realize, especially once it was found in the 1910s and 
1920s that in reality the demand for waste products was not par-
ticularly great. The incineration regime, meanwhile, saw waste’s 
utility value as uninteresting. The various sorts of resource recovery 
that the city engaged in were primarily concerned with facilitating 
incineration, while the waste was not seen as having any value that 
was worth exploiting. Waste was instead an aesthetic and later an 
environmental liability. In the late 1960s the rhetoric changed, and 

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