Can Malmö's green solutions provide answers to energy and climate crises?

Recycling, green energy, sobriety, what are the recipes in the face of the energy crisis and the climate emergency? Euronews visited the city of Malmö, in Sweden, which is known as a sustainable economy model, to find some answers.

Olof and his wife Yuki are both Industrial Designers, and are proud of the products they grow, in one of the allotments rented by the city of Malmö, in the south of Sweden. 

For them, it's a way to preserve the environment by producing part of the food they eat with their two children.

In their flat in the city centre, Olof and Yuki also find ways to follow a more sustainable way of life. They try to buy as many products as they can without packaging, and recycle paper, metal, glass, and plastics as well as biowaste, which goes towards biogas production.

Fuel produced from organic waste is what runs most of the city of Malmö's fleet of garbage trucks.

Waste treatment plant

In the waste treatment plant that Euronews visited, more than 600,000 tonnes of waste are treated per year, coming from the area’s 14 municipalities, but also imported from all over Europe.

Transformed into slurry, the organic waste will be converted into fuel in another company. The rest supplies the urban grid with energy.

Ann Nerlund, the Environmental Educator at Sysav, admits that incinerating waste produces carbon dioxide, both biogenic carbon dioxide, and fossil carbon dioxide.

In an effort to combat this, they are trying to work towards removing the plastic from the combustible waste and they are also exploring the possibility of carbon capture and storage. 

The company organised a presentation of the first automated sorting plant for used textiles in the world, installed on its premises last year.

Sorted by colour and by fibre