No, Sweden does not recycle 99 percent of its waste.
TerraCycle tom szaky Include USA
Our friends at Inhabitat are running a very popular post titled How Sweden recycles 99 percent of its waste, which they picked up from Global Citizen. They are not the first to cover this; back in 2014 Huffpo ran 99 Per Cent Of Sweden's Garbage Is Now Recycled. It all seems to derive from an official Swedish government site which writes that “With its ongoing recycling revolution, less than one per cent of Sweden’s household waste ends up in a rubbish dump” and comes with an impressive video, which Mike covered earlier in TreeHugger.
The trouble is, by any definition of recycling, this is a stretch. In fact, they incinerate about 50 percent of their waste to make heat and energy. And even in their own website, they admit that is not the best approach, that it is not really recycling, and that it takes less energy to actually recycle and reuse than it does to burn and manufacture a replacement from scratch.
Then there is the question of what impact waste to energy has on the actual recycling rate. TreeHugger contributor Tom Szaky wrote in his post, Does waste-to-energy make sense?
Waste-to-energy also acts as a disincentive to develop more sustainable waste reduction strategies. It may work better in the short term with strict pollution standards and as a last-resort for waste disposal, but it does not offer us a sustainable long-term solution. Preserving material (through recycling and reuse) already in circulation is a key component of sustainable development. Burning finite resources may not be the best approach down the line.