Malmö, Sweden

Promoting resource-efficient actions with a focus on social impacts to achieve climate neutrality by 2030

About Malmö, Sweden

Malmö is Sweden’s third largest city and a multicultural hub. It has been one of the earliest and most industrialized towns in Scandinavia, and was considered an industrial wasteland for many years due to its shipyard and other heavy industries.

With time, Malmö has transformed into a sustainable city founded on knowledge and sustainability thanks to the city’s efforts to implement front-running sustainable interventions. In 2015, the City of Malmö was the first municipality in Sweden to sign a declaration of commitment to work to achieve the global goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which includes the goal of becoming climate-neutral by 2030. 

However, Malmö’s ecological footprint still needs to be reduced. With a total waste generation of 473 kilos per inhabitant, the city must undergo a transition towards a more circular economy where spillage and waste is minimized and energy efficiency is facilitated. Products, materials and resources must be fully utilized, re-used where possible, and finally recycled.

Watch the video to learn more about Malmö’s circular initiatives.

Ambitions of the city

As a signatory city of the European Circular Cities Declaration, Malmö aims to incentivize circular urban development through net-zero initiatives, together with the industrial sector and its citizens. Several strategic plans are integrating Circular Economy approaches to facilitate this vision: the Goal 12 of the Environmental Programme for the City of Malmö 2021-2030, the Waste and Eco-cycle Plan 2021-2030, and the Strategy for Climate Neutral Constructions in cooperation with the Local Roadmap for Malmö 2030 are documents that directly address the need for ‘’resource efficiency’’. Circular development efforts across action plans can be translated into a set of priorities that the city is currently focusing on.

Malmö's circular development priorities

  • Circular buildings and construction

    In Sweden, the construction sector accounts for more than 20% of the country’s total environmental impact, and between 80-90% of the environmental impact of furniture is linked to the materials and components used to produce it. With the goal of being climate-neutral by 2030, Malmö is the first city in Sweden to have developed a local roadmap for a climate-neutral building sector – LFM30. Local construction industries have also signed the Climate Neutral Building partnership, which have identified recycled and upcycled materials as the core to carbon reduction.

  • Circular water systems

    In Malmö, almost 70 million cubic meters enter the wastewater system annually. The city approaches ‘waste-water’ as ‘resource-water’ and foresees abundant circular solutions and business opportunities from it in the near future. Not only the city needs to be more water-smart and efficient, but inside the resource-water, future opportunities to recover hydrogen and biochar, among other yet-unknown solutions, are seen on the horizon. Moreover, Malmö has been making use of local green spaces to close the water recovery system. By incorporating local vegetation, rainwater is connected to the sea through open storm water management.

  • Circular food systems

    The municipality of Malmö, with a procurement value of around 0.9 billion euros per year, is currently making efforts to increase circularity in their school meals service through the promotion of organic and plant-based food. The city of Malmö purchases about 8,500 tons of food every year (worth €24 million), serving 65,000 lunches a day. Closing the loop on food systems is attracting new business opportunities to the city, and this can be seen in the number of new enterprises growing among rescued food.

Malmö's circular development initiatives

Incentivizing circular furniture through public procurement

 In 2018, the city decided to pilot a procurement approach aimed at increasing the reuse of furniture, while driving as much attention as possible to existing internal services. This framework includes office furniture, conference furniture, and preschool and school furniture. In addition to the City administration, the framework is also used by Malmö’s seven publicly owned companies. In order to ensure this framework has the desired impacts, Malmö has been implementing these standards with a special focus on awareness-raising and behavioral change. Moreover, in relation to public procurement, the city is also experimenting with circular materials to use as an alternative to plastics in all-weather football pitches and playgrounds, as well as with the procurement of baby strollers and buses.

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