After Iceland’s largest landfill winds down, residents must find new ways to handle their waste

REYKJAVIK – In December 2023, Iceland’s largest landfill, Alfsnes, shut down most of its operations, accepting only materials that could not be recycled, such as fishing nets and asbestos.

Since then, people have had to step up to cope with the two ways in which the country now manages its refuse – recycling or exporting it abroad, to be incinerated for energy production, for instance.

The Alfsnes landfill is located just north of Reykjavik and used to take in the waste of two-thirds of the country’s nearly 390,000 people.

It was run by the country’s largest waste management company, government partner Sorpa. 

Sorpa handles about 200,000 tonnes of waste annually, most of which used to get dumped at Alfsnes.

Iceland still has about 14 working landfills and one incinerator.

But the landfills are small, each serving less than 5 per cent of the population, while the incinerator is reserved only for hazardous waste, such as used syringes.

Unlike other countries with landfill bans such as Sweden which opts to incinerate its rubbish for energy, Iceland rejected incineration for three reasons: expense, the cost to the environment, and a plentiful supply of energy generated from geothermal sources.

Instead, all biodegradable waste is now trucked to Gaja, a composting and biogas plant located at Alfsnes, which is also run by Sorpa. The plant opened in 2021 at the Alfsnes site to prepare for the eventual shutdown of the landfill.

As for the rest of the waste generated, an even greater proportion of what is non-biodegradable is now exported.

Winding down the landfill aligns with European Union waste directives, which call on member countries to reduce the biowaste sent to landfills by 35 per cent and to separate the collection of such waste by 2023. 

Though Iceland is not part of the EU, it is legally bound to follow EU waste directives under the European Economic Area agreement, which allows Iceland to be part of the European market without being a member country.

However, it must follow regulations such as the waste directives.

“The closure of Alfsnes was in response to the EU laws, but also, we found better ways to process waste,” says Ms Teodora Andelkovic, project manager at Gaja. 

For example, the plant can produce up to 21,600 cubic m of biogas, like methane, weekly.

“The same amount of biogas that a landfill would emit over 100 years can be produced and collected here in three weeks,” says Ms Andelkovic, 30. 

As for the recyclable non-biowaste, like plastics and wood, some amount of such refuse has always been exported by Iceland to neighbouring countries, and since Alfsnes has shut most of its operations, the amount exported has soared. 

Leading waste export company Islenska Gamafelagid went from exporting 100,000 tonnes of waste per year to double the amount since the landfill started shutting down.

Almost half of the exported material is incinerated in countries which convert the waste to thermal energy for electricity and heating, while other categories of material, such as wood, paper and metal, are sold to recycling companies.

With electronic waste, individual 90cm- to 120cm-high bales of computer parts and chips can fetch between 5 million Icelandic krona (S$47,500) and 50 million Icelandic krona when sold to companies in France that extract precious metals from the parts, like silver.

But only some kinds of waste can be exported, and individuals must play their part to make the sorting process efficient.

“Exporting waste requires following strict standards of the quality of waste,” says the company’s chief executive, Mr Jon Thorir Frantzson. “That’s why, even if we sort the waste again at our facility, we need sorting to start at the home to make this more efficient.”

For residents, waste management has become more rigorous as they have to separate their household rubbish into seven categories: paper, plastic, biowaste, textiles, metals, glass and hazardous waste.

To motivate residents, there are financial incentives such as the “Pay-As-You-Throw” scheme introduced in 2023, where consumers who sort their waste pay less to have their rubbish collected.

A single 120-litre “mixed waste” bin will cost $409 per year, over four times more than a 240-litre sorted waste bin at $96 per year. 

These regulations are also part of the country’s circular economy law, which was passed on Jan 1, 2023, with the goals of reducing waste generation and promoting recycling.

So have these measures helped to achieve the goals? Ms Bergdis Helga Bjarnadottir, adviser at the Environment Agency of Iceland, says it may still be too early to say. 

“We’re still collecting data for 2023 and 2024 – we will be publishing it soon,” she says. “We are hopeful that the measures improve recycling overall, through better-quality waste getting processed rather than dumped.”