Claim:
Sweden imports trash from other countries because it does not have enough to fuel its waste-to-energy plants that produce electricity and heating.
Rating:
What’s True
Sweden imports millions of metric tons of trash from other countries per year, using the garbage to fuel its waste-to-energy plants.
What’s False
Snopes found no evidence Sweden would be unable to fill its energy needs without the imported garbage. Swedish energy companies charge countries for incineration of overseas trash, and officials from Sweden’s energy industry have said their plants are not dependent on imported trash for fuel.
Can one man’s trash literally be another man’s treasure, as the oft-repeated proverb goes? In late 2025, a claim (archived) circulated online that put a literal spin on the saying.
According to online posts, the country of Sweden imports trash from other countries because it does not have enough to fuel its waste-to-energy plants that produce electricity and heating.
One Facebook page posted:
Thanks to a top-tier recycling system and strong environmental values, less than 1% of Swedish household waste ends up in landfills. Instead, Sweden uses waste-to-energy (WtE) — a process where trash is incinerated under strict regulations to generate electricity and heating. With too little waste of its own, Sweden now takes in garbage from countries like the UK, Ireland, and Norway — and gets paid to do it.
The claim also circulated on X (archived), Threads (archived), Instagram (archived) and Bluesky (archived). Some posts about Sweden’s waste imports dated back to 2013 (archived, archived).
According to data from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, the claim that Sweden imports waste from other countries has been true since at least 2010. In 2024, the Scandinavian country imported 3.86 million metric tons of waste through cross-border shipments mainly from the U.K., Norway and Italy, according to the agency. The amount of waste imported has steadily risen since 2010.
Despite this, the country does not rely on imported trash to keep its plants running. Anna-Carin Gripwall, the director of communications for Avfall Sverige, the Swedish Waste Management association, reportedly told The Independent in 2016 that Sweden’s waste-to-power plants could also run on biofuel if there was not enough trash to burn. Gripwall confirmed that this was still true in a Dec. 18, 2025, email to Snopes.
Swedenergy, a nonprofit industry and special interest organization for companies that supply, distribute, sell and store energy, also wrote in an FAQ that if trash supplies ran out, plants would use other types of fuel.
Given the above, we rate this claim mostly true because while Sweden does import trash, there was no evidence the country would be unable to fulfill its energy needs without the imported garbage.
Sweden treated 20.2 million metric tons of domestic waste in 2022, according to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. That same year, it used 6.68 million tons — around 33% — as fuel for “energy recovery,” generally meaning incineration in waste-to-power plants. Sweden imported 2.92 million metric tons of waste, mainly from the U.K., Norway and Italy, in 2022.
Efficient waste processing creates Swedish payday
Sweden imports waste to incinerate in a type of facility known as “kraftvärmeverk.” These are usually combined heat and iower plants, which is a type of waste-to-energy plant.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, typical CHP plants work by fueling an engine or turbine that produces electricity. The CHP also captures the heat created in the process as hot water or steam that can used to heat homes or other buildings.
More than half of Swedish homes use district heating, a heating system that uses a central power source such as a CHP to heat many homes in a single area, according to Swedenergy. In 2024, around 10% of Sweden’s electricity came from waste-to-energy plants, according to Sweden.se, a website run by the Swedish Institute, a public agency that promotes Sweden in the wider world.
In addition to using imported waste as fuel for waste-to-energy plants, Swedish energy companies can line their pockets with fees from incinerating overseas waste. In 2015, SVT, Sweden’s public broadcaster, reported that energy companies made roughly 798 million Swedish krona (around $122.7 million) from incinerating waste from overseas in 2013, at a rate of 373 Swedish krona per metric ton.
Snopes could not find more recent figures for these earnings, which Gripwall said were a trade secret. If the 373 Swedish krona per metric ton payment rate remained the same, Swedish energy companies would have made just over 1 billion Swedish krona (around $107 million) from importing 2.92 million metric tons of waste in 2022.
Though Sweden receives and incinerates waste from large parts of Europe, it also exports some for processing. According to statistics from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, the country has exported around half a metric ton of waste annually, mainly to countries like Norway, Denmark and Germany, since 2010. Swedenergy wrote on its website that such waste could include plastic or electronics that other countries are better placed to process.
Snopes previously investigated whether a Swedish broadcaster showed a CEO drinking Agent Orange and whether Swedes “called in gay” to work to protest the country’s health system’s classification of homosexuality as an illness in the 1970s.
Sources
Avfallsbehandling i Sverige. https://www.naturvardsverket.se/data-och-statistik/avfall/behandling-avfall-sverige/. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
‘District Heating’. International Energy Agency, 11 July 2023, https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/district-heating.
‘Energy Use in Sweden’. Sweden.Se, 18 Nov. 2025, https://sweden.se/climate/sustainability/energy-use-in-sweden.
Import och export av avfall. https://www.naturvardsverket.se/data-och-statistik/avfall/avfall-import-export/. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
Jönsson, Mattias. ‘Fjärrvärmestatistik – Energiföretagen Sverige’. Energiföretagen, https://www.energiforetagen.se/statistik/fjarrvarmestatistik/. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
Jönsson, Oskar, et al. ‘Tjänar miljoner på utländska sopor’. SVT Nyheter, 9 June 2015, https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/tjanar-miljoner-pa-utlandska-sopor.
Rydegran, Eva. ‘Frågor och svar om energiåtervinning ur avfall – Energiföretagen Sverige’. Energiföretagen, https://www.energiforetagen.se/fragor-vi-driver/listsida/fjarrvarmefragor/tillforsel-fjarrvarme-och-kraftvarme/avfall/fragor-och-svar-om-energiatervinning-av-avfallny-sida/. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
Search Annual and Monthly Average Exchange Rates. https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/statistics/interest-rates-and-exchange-rates/search-annual-and-monthly-average-exchange-rates/. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
Sheffield, Hazel. ‘Sweden’s Recycling Is so Revolutionary the Country Has Run out of Rubbish’. The Independent, 10 Dec. 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/sweden-s-recycling-is-so-revolutionary-the-country-has-run-out-of-rubbish-a7462976.html.
Waste-to-Energy (MSW) in Depth – U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/biomass/waste-to-energy-in-depth.php. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.
‘What Is CHP?’ Overviews and Factsheets. United States Environmental Protection Agency, 19 Aug. 2015, https://www.epa.gov/chp/what-chp.
