10 ways to a greener future

2. Wood buildings on the rise

An extraordinary building dominates the skyline of the northern city of Skellefteå since 2021, Sara Cultural Centre. The building is entirely made of wood and close to 80 metres tall, making it one of the tallest timber buildings in the world.

Another wooden example is Botanikern in Uppsala, a housing complex with a frame made of cross-laminated timber (CLT) and a wooden façade. The wood will go grey over time and greenery emphasises the natural material.

Sweden is a true woodland. In fact, the country is about two-thirds forest, offering great possibilities to build in wood. It also makes perfect sense from a sustainability perspective, as timber is both a renewable and recyclable resource.

All around Sweden, more and more high-rises are now built in wood as part of the efforts to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045, Sweden’s overall climate goal for a greener future.

3. Sustainability through urban farming

More than half of the vegetables eaten in Sweden are imported. That’s probably part of the reason why urban farming is growing. It’s about bringing farming closer to the consumers. How about farming vegetables in the supermarket?

Swegreen is a Swedish food tech company that offers in-store farming of herbs and vegetables, with plants stacked high on shelves. Perks? Production all year round using less land and water, while bringing the food closer to the consumers. Grönska and Nära are a couple of other examples in the same field.

Allotment gardens are also popular, with community urban farming land all over the country. One of the greatest benefits of having green spaces in urban areas is the increase in biodiversity, with many different species thriving on the variety of plants found in urban agriculture.

4. Reducing food waste through food banks

Swedish households have reduced their food waste substantially over the last ten years, but it still amounted to about 1.3 million tonnes in 2023. Food banks offer a way of helping reduce food waste through redistribution. It’s a way for food donations from restaurants and supermarkets to be passed on to people in need.

Sweden’s city mission charities, stadsmissioner, have several food banks in different parts of the country. In Stockholm the city mission runs Matmissionen (link in Swedish), where foods are sold at reduced prices.

In Gothenburg the grassroots initiative Solidarity Fridge depends on volunteer ‘food savers’ to gather food donations and redistribute them to a network of fridges around the city, where people can collect the food for free. The initiative has also spread to the town of Arvika.

And then there's Matsmart, that sells surplus food online. Food that would mostly have been thrown away otherwise, for various reasons.

And, yes, 'mat' means food in Swedish.

5. Farming fish for future food feasts

Land-based fish farms are popping up in many parts of Sweden. In a time when our oceans face challenges such as overfishing and overfertilisation, farming fish in tanks offers a greener way to get fish on your plate.

One advantage of farming fish this way is that the farmers can reuse the water the fish swim in to water the fields. And the fish feces can be turned into fertiliser.

One of several Swedish fish farms is Gårdsfisk in the southern Swedish province of Skåne. The company is the brainchild of a marine biologist and a civil engineer specialised in technical water resource management, who both wanted to be a part of revolutionising Swedish food production.

Gårdsfisk has chosen to farm two types of fish – Clarias (Clarias gariepinus) and Rödstrimma (Oreochromis niloticus) – that like to swim in groups, an advantage when living in tanks.

6. Climate-smart living and sharing

Sege Park in the southern city of Malmö is a model for urban development. This area combines affordable housing with a local sharing economy. The idea is to make it easier for residents to share goods and services, so that they own less but at the same time have access to more.

A wooden multifunctional parking garage is another feature. Apart from parking spaces for cars, it includes a bicycle parking; a ‘bicycle kitchen‘, where residents can go to fix their bikes; and a ‘mobility pool’, where residents can rent cars and bikes from a shared pool. The building also includes solar panels, plant-covered façades, stormwater recycling, charging points for electric vehicles and energy flow optimisation.

Through rebuilds and newbuilds, this old hospital park will house about 1,000 new homes. It is the first project in Malmö to have been certified within CEEQUAL, an international evidence-based sustainability assessment system.

7. Show me the cans

Swedes recycle about 90 per cent of their aluminium cans and 80 per cent of used plastic drink bottles. Everyone who buys a can or plastic bottle has to pay a minor deposit, pant, a deposit the consumers get back when they recycle the empty bottles and cans.

Despite the seemingly high recycling degree, there’s still room for improvement. The target for both cans and plastic bottles is 90 per cent recycling.

The Swedish deposit return system is managed by Returpack, a company owned by the country’s retailers and drink producers. Consumers take their bottles and cans to a pantautomat, a sort of reverse vending machines, in their local supermarket. There is often the choice of getting the deposit back or donating it to charity. The recycled bottles and cans are then transported to a hub in the city of Norrköping, where they are recycled and turned into new bottles and cans every year.

This sustainable recycling solution is one of Europe’s oldest schemes. All drink bottles and cans ready for consumption must, by law, be included in an approved recycling system before being marketed in Sweden. During the second half of 2025, Sweden raises the deposit to encourage people to recycle even more.

8. The wheels on the electric bus go round and round

Electrified, emission-free public transport is rolling out over Sweden. ElectriCity is a Gothenburg-based arena for collaboration, which has been used as a testbed for electrified buses and other means of transport since 2015.

Here, industry, research and society work together. Solutions like geofencing have been tested, developed and evaluated in real traffic environments, together with national and international actors. Geofencing is a virtual fence that can be used to digitally control a vehicle’s movements within a particular geographical area. For example, speed can be lowered outside schools to improve traffic safety, emissions can be reduced and better traffic flows created.

With the ongoing electrification of the transport sector, more and more vehicles need charging, placing new demands on the electrical grid. ElectriCity is looking into ideas for how to make the power needs more predictable and the power supply more sustainable. To keep the wheels turning, it would be good if not all bus drivers had to charge their buses at the same time, right?

9. Where textile waste becomes circular raw material

Siptex is a pioneering textile sorting facility in southern Swedish city Malmö. Here, textiles that can’t be reused are sorted after colour and type of fibre and then gathered into 250-kilo bales to be sold on to recyclers looking for material. The sorting is done on an industrial scale thanks to an automated process where near-infrared light is used.

At full capacity, the Siptex plant can sort 24,000 tonnes of textiles per year. That’s a great volume of textile waste made useful instead of being discarded. The circular raw material is called ReFab, ‘Renewable Fabulous Fabric’.

Siptex, ‘Swedish Innovation Platform for Textile sorting’, started out as a research project aiming to create a link between collected textile waste and high-quality fibre-to-fibre recycling. In November 2022, Siptex left the research stage and is now a part of Sysav, a waste management company with a circular approach.

As of 2025, textile waste must be sorted in Sweden – this goes for private households as well as businesses.

10. From waste to district heating

The first Swedish district heating system was introduced in 1948, to provide an energy-efficient solution for heating homes. Today, district heating is the most common source of heating in Sweden. This form of heating both saves costs and lowers carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

In the second largest city of Gothenburg, most buildings and houses are connected to the district heating system’s network of underground pipes and cables. It is a waste-to-energy solution that uses local resources such as burnt rubbish or captured excess heat from industrial production or data centres to heat up water and distribute it to everyone connected to the system. By doing so, 93 per cent of all energy in the system is either recycled or comes from renewable resources.

Through its own energy company, Göteborg Energi, the city of Gothenburg is leading this efficient method, which accounts for 90 per cent of the heating used in flats in the city, as well as about 12,000 private homes, many industries, offices, shops and public buildings.

In Stockholm 80 per cent of the heating comes from district heating (link in Swedish).