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.

 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.

​​To strengthen the city’s and the local business community’s capacity to transition towards circular construction, the city of Malmö participates in the national initiative “Center for circular construction”, often called CCBuild, which is an arena where industry actors, municipalities and academia meet and collaborate on through a sharing platform for construction materials, knowledge sharing and best practices e.g., recycling and circular material flows during construction, demolition and management. In a similar light of CCBuild, the Circular Builders project, a Danish-Swedish cooperation in a project for circular construction and demolition that Malmö participates in. This project aims to incentivize the development of innovative and circular solutions in construction through demonstration projects, and exchange of experiences and scaling. In Malmö, the demolition of the hovercraft terminal has been highlighted as a best practice.

Malmö participates in the ProCirc project, together with other municipalities of the North Sea Region. This project aims to accelerate circular economy principles implementation through procurement power, alliance and capacity-building. Each of the 30 pilots aims to reduce raw materials usage, waste production and CO2 emissions by 20-25%. Insights and tools regarding specific sectors like construction, furniture and ICT will be disseminated in the North Sea region by creating an active transnational network on the topic. In Malmö, procurement of circular navigation signs has been a direct result of the ProCirc project. The contract for the signs of the city includes their procurement from reusing markets when possible, and when necessary, a requirement for new signs to include circular principles such as reused materials like aluminium, and signs that are made for reuse and disassembly.

The REWAISE project proposes a paradigm shift towards a carbon-neutral water cycle, addressing technological, financial, legal and social issues to fully harness the value of water. Current efforts focus on extracting and benefiting from the dissolved substances and energy inherent in raw and used water streams, and the promotion of economic activities and businesses related to the water sector. The living lab of Malmö pioneers in rain and storm water reutilization, as well as in nutrient recovery.

Working together with the different departments within the city has been key to a successful promotion of circular food systems through public procurement, specifically in public canteens. In schools, meat is on the menu once or twice a week, fish once or twice weekly and vegetarian meals at least twice a week, in accordance with the nutritional recommendations of the Swedish Food Agency. Malmö is also cooperating with actors outside of the city. Its close relationship with suppliers has helped the city reach food and climate goals by sourcing high-quality, plant-based options, as well as improving the variety of organic produce on offer. But there are still challenges to overcome: Food waste reduction needs to be more drastic; cooperation with schools can be strengthened; acceptance rates of plant-based meals have to pick up. The City of Malmö is committed to working towards a sustainable Malmö with healthy, climate friendly food served in our pre-schools, schools and care homes.

SIPTex is the world’s first large-scale facility of its kind, owned by Sysav, a clothing recycling company that handles almost one million tons of waste per year. The machine sorts textile waste so that it can move to the next step of the value chain and eventually become new fabric. SIPTex is the world’s first machine able to sort textiles by color and fiber composition at high-speed using near-infrared light. This technology makes it possible to handle large flows and produce textile fractions that are then adapted to different recycling processes. Today’s manual sorting of textiles can not match the market’s need for quality-assured products. Automated sorting is the link that is currently missing between collection and high-quality textile recycling. Therefore, Siptex will contribute to increased circularity in the textile value chain and strengthen Sweden’s position as a pioneer in innovation and circular economy. The facility aims to become a game changer as the solution to the missing link in the chain to create a circular loop for textile in Sweden and Europe.