Author: Christopher Crompton
In our monthly series, Window on Europe, we shine a light on the best policy ideas emerging from across the continent and consider the lessons they may hold for the United Kingdom. In this piece, which is adapted from our recent report ‘Learning From Our Neighbours: Air Quality Policy in Europe‘, Christopher Crompton examines Sweden’s efforts in tackling methane emissions from landfill. You can keep up to date with these articles and IEEP UK’s other work by subscribing to our monthly newsletter.
Methane (CH4) is a powerful greenhouse gas, responsible for 12% of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Europe. It is also a precursor to the development of ground-level ozone (O3), an air pollutant linked to respiratory disease. The Global Methane Assessment estimated that ozone attributable to anthropogenic methane emissions causes globally around half a million premature deaths per year. Around 94% of the urban population of the EU are subject to levels of O3 that exceed World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines. At the same time, ground-level O3 harms ecosystems and agricultural production, being responsible for at least EUR 2 billion in damage to food crops every year in Europe.
Sweden reduced its methane emissions by 68 percent between 1990 and 2015 and they are projected to continue falling sharply until 2027. Part of the explanation for this is that the nation is reducing agricultural emissions, mostly because its cattle population is declining. This is due to increased productivity, product pricing mechanisms, and adoption of EU policy regulations. However, aside from agriculture, another of the key sources of methane emissions is the waste sector, most notably landfill sites. As of 2020, Sweden’s methane emissions from waste amounted to 0.68 Mt CO2 equivalent, marking an 80 percent decrease since 1990. This is on par with Sweden’s overall 80 percent reduction in GHGs between 1990-2022, which it achieved while growing its economy.
Landfill Waste
The decline in Sweden’s methane emissions from landfill has been driven by policy instruments both at national and EU levels. These interventions centre around three key factors: expansion of methane recovery from landfills, reduced landfill disposal of organic material, and increased recovery of materials and waste incineration with energy recovery. Without intervention, landfills produce and emit large amounts of methane for several decades after deposits are made.
Early action on waste was taken through the requirement since 1991 for all municipalities in Sweden to have their own municipal waste plan. The Swedish Government established both a National Waste Plan and a National Prevention Programme to guide municipalities in developing their local plans and deciding on priorities.
The 1999 EU Landfill Directive (Directive 1999/31/EC) requires that landfilling of biodegradable waste is reduced and that methane is collected from landfills, preferably through waste incineration with energy recovery. Sweden’s national legislation goes further than the requirements of the EU Directive, regulating landfilling of biodegradable waste as well as collection of methane from landfills, and since 2005 has included a ban on landfilling of organic waste.
From 2000, Sweden introduced a landfill tax on waste disposal to landfill. The tax has increased gradually since; in 2025, it was levied at 725 Swedish kronor (around 60 Euros) per tonne of landfilled waste, and it is subject to annual review. In 2001, the introduction of the Swedish Ordinance on the Landfill of Waste (SFS 2001:512) banned the landfilling of combustible waste from 2002. The Ordinance also regulates the collection and disposal of methane gas from landfills. A further ban was introduced for organic material in 2005.
Emissions from the Swedish waste sector have fallen by 77% since 1990 due to combined policy efforts effecting improved methane recovery from landfills, reduced organic waste disposal, and investments in recycling and waste-to-energy.
Circular economy as a counter to landfilling
Sweden’s broader policy on circular economy aims to reduce both the use of materials and the amount of waste that goes to landfill. This action has been spurred by a series of EU regulations and directives, including the Directive on Waste, Regulation on Shipment of Waste, and EU REACH.
The “waste hierarchy” has long been a key principle in Sweden’s approach to waste management and circular economy. Some of Sweden’s key actions to reduce waste to landfill have involved promoting and incentivising shifts to actions further up the waste hierarchy. For example, the 2000 landfill tax was intended to make landfilling relatively less economically attractive than alternative treatment methods, while the bans on landfilling combustible waste and organic waste in 2002 and 2005 respectively forced other treatments for those materials.
Importantly, the move toward energy recovery required the relevant infrastructure to be in place. By 2016, it had established its 32 waste-to-energy plants, both municipal and private, and had advanced its waste sorting capabilities to better organise the waste used in energy and heat production. These plants recover heat and energy from both household and industrial waste and include technology to collect flue gases. The flue gases and wastewater are then cleaned, almost eliminating emissions of heavy metals. Meanwhile, high incineration temperatures should remove the vast majority of methane.
However, expansion of energy recovery capabilities carries the risk of over-reliance on incineration as opposed to the more complicated and generally more costly process of recycling. This is certainly a relevant concern for the country, as it is for the UK, as we will revisit in the Lessons from Sweden. Research has indicated that overall, incineration is worse for local air quality than landfill.
The UK context
The UK has enacted a landfill tax since 1996, the country’s first explicit environmental tax. Increased rates over time have helped disincentivise landfilling of waste. The UK also implemented the EU Landfill Directive while still an EU Member State, which was retained in England and the devolved nations. The amount of residual waste (waste that is not reused or recycled, excluding major mineral wastes) sent to landfill decreased by around half between 2010-2025 as a result of these policies. A report for HM Treasury found that the UK landfill tax has been effective in achieving its primary objective of reducing waste to landfill, an incentive effect that has strengthened over time as the rates have increased. For example, for municipal solid waste, a £1 increase in the landfill tax is associated with an average reduction of 2,079 tonnes in waste disposed in landfill for each local authority.
Latest statistics show that UK methane emissions have reduced by 62% between 1990 and 2023, one of the highest percentage reductions amongst OECD countries, which has been achieved notably through policy progress in the fuel supply, waste and agriculture sectors. However, despite the UK waste sector’s 74% reduction in methane emissions since 1990, this sector still generates 31% of the UK’s methane emissions, and 81% of which are from landfill gas.
Lessons for the UK from Sweden
The introduction of landfill taxes in both Sweden and the UK helped to provide a cost incentive to reduce landfill waste and move further up the waste hierarchy. The danger with this is that if it is easier and cheaper to move up just one level – to energy recovery through incineration – than it is to recycle, this eventually becomes the dominant treatment and there is insufficient incentive for recycling, reuse, or prevention of waste.
In 2025, the European Environment Agency (EEA) reported that, “There is no clear indication that waste generation is decoupled from economic growth and Sweden’s waste is generally increasing”. While Sweden has reduced landfilling to account to less than 1% of waste disposal, the majority of its residual waste is instead incinerated, accounting for 59% of waste treated, while it has a recycling rate of 40%. The EU average recycling rate is 49% and average incineration rate is 27%.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the tonnage of waste incinerated nearly trebled between 2010 and 2020, with a further 12% increase up to 2023 in England. In 2023-4, just over half of municipal waste in England was incinerated, with rates of around 30% in the rest of the UK. The recycling rate from UK households in 2023 was 44% in England, 50.2% in Northern Ireland, 42.1% in Scotland, and 57% in Wales.
While the UK’s landfill tax has been shown to have a positive impact on preventing waste in the first place, which may explain the reductions in the volume of waste sent for recycling as the tax rate increases, study findings suggest a lack of conclusive evidence of the tax promoting options higher up in the waste hierarchy.
While the shift away from landfill toward incineration is ostensibly effective in terms of reducing methane emissions, the broader environmental picture is not so straightforward. Firstly, while high-temperature incineration removes most methane, some can remain. For example, one study that monitored an incinerator chimney in Sweden found there were still methane emissions of 7–11 tonnes per year. Secondly, the same study found emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O) corresponding to 30–40 tonnes per year. This is a consequence of adding urea to decrease nitrogen oxides (NOX) emissions, in order to comply with NOX regulation, but the N2O subsequently released is approximately three times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 on a 100-year time scale.
However, the most important environmental implication of incinerator plants in the UK concerns the shift in the mix of waste being burned. Food waste produces less harmful GHGs when burned compared to when it is landfilled, but when plastic is burned, it produces 175 times more CO2e compared to landfill.
According to The Big Plastic Count, a scheme set up by campaign groups Greenpeace and Everyday Plastic, only 16% of UK plastic waste is being recycled in 2026, with 59% burned and the remainder shipped abroad or buried in landfill. This helps to explain why a 2024 investigation by the BBC that examined five years of data from across the UK found that incinerating waste is producing almost the same amount of GHGs for each unit of energy produced as coal power.
Wales and Scotland have introduced bans on building new incinerator plants, but England and Northern Ireland are yet to follow suit. The UK Climate Change Committee has cautioned that no further plants should be built without efforts to capture all of their GHG emissions. However, this is not currently happening in the UK’s 58 incinerators; one pilot project is underway at the Ferrybridge energy-from-waste facility but only collects one tonne of CO2e per day, despite producing more than half a million tonnes per year. The UK government has stated that it will only support new projects that, “offer the best efficiency and are future proofed towards supporting our net zero objectives”, but that does mean it is open to new facilities and does not deal with emissions from existing sites. Much more clearly remains to be done to address these negative climate effects, either through avoiding incineration of plastic or substantial expansion of capture efforts at incineration sites.
Sweden also faces criticism for an over-reliance on waste incineration. In 2023, the European Commission (EC) flagged this issue for Sweden and made a series of specific policy recommendations including: support preparing for reuse of municipal waste and reuse systems for packaging; develop waste treatment infrastructure associated with the higher steps of the waste hierarchy to reduce reliance on incineration, including infrastructure for the recycling of plastic packaging; improve separate collection services for waste fractions separated at source – in particular for packaging and bio-waste – to ensure high capture rates across the country; and introduce support mechanisms to ensure the separate collection of recyclable municipal waste from businesses.
What Sweden has done differently to the UK to date is to include emissions from energy-from-waste sites in its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) since 2013. It is the only nation in the EU apart from Denmark to do this voluntarily, moving beyond EU requirements. The Swedish example here has shown that some waste companies have subsequently invested in after-sorting facilities to separate out plastic waste from the residual waste mix, so less plastic is incinerated and lower costs are borne under the ETS.
The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) acknowledged in 2011 that “emissions from waste combustion of non-biogenic material (via any technology including mass-burn incineration) are also not comprehensively reflected in the price of disposal. Unless the installation in question is in the ETS (municipal solid waste incinerators are excluded) a negative externality persists – such installations are creating GHG emissions without paying the relevant price”. However, the UK does not currently include incinerator emissions in its ETS.
The UK Government did publish a consultation to consider expanding its ETS scope to include energy from waste, which is now closed and is being assessed. If it goes ahead, the proposal for expansion would start from 2028 and this would mark a helpful move in allowing costs better to reflect the climate damages implicated in waste incineration.
To read the full analysis of Sweden’s action on methane in waste, see the full report here.
Photo by Raphael Andres on Unsplash