The Amazing Race 35, Episode 9

Socerb (Slovenia) - Stockholm (Sweden)

[Apartment buildings and boat docks along one of the canals near the center of Stockholm, a few weeks before The Amazing Race 35 visited Stockholm.]

The Amazing Race 35 arrived in Sweden a few days after the summer solstice, and one of their tasks in this episode was to take part in a celebration of the “Midsommar” holiday. At these northern latitudes, with so little sun in mid-winter, the longest day of the year is really something to celebrate. There’s no true midnight sun on midsummer’s eve in Stockholm, but the sun never gets far enough below the horizon for it to get completely dark — there’s substantial twilight all night.

[Waiting area for trains at Stockholm Central Station. The Amazing Race 35 passed through the T-Centralen subway station on a lower level.]

The Midsommar holiday in Sweden is celebrated as a three-day (or longer) weekend. Like Thanksgiving in the USA, it’s one of the most important occasions for annual family reunion and domestic travel. As the Swedish tourist board notes, “Most Swedes travel to the countryside to celebrate Midsummer with family and friends. Many cities turn quiet.” It may or may not be a good time to visit Stockholm or other Swedish cities. You won’t find crowds, but you will find many shops, restaurants, and attractions closed.

[“Möllevångstorget” in Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city, is normally filled with produce stalls and shoppers. But on the Midsommar holiday weekend, as seen here, the square is empty and traffic is light.]

The city of Stockholm occupies numerous islands, and the racers were ferried around on private motor launches. An elegant way to travel, but expensive and unnecessary. As in the San Francisco Bay area, where the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transit District operates public ferries as well as buses between San Francisco and points north, Storstockholms Lokaltrafik (SL)operates public commuter ferries in and around Stockholm.

[Ferries like this for pedestrians and bicyclists are fully integrated into the Stockholm public transit system.]

The fare for a ride on any of these ferries is the same as for a ride on a city bus, streetcar, or subway — outstanding value for the money for a harbor cruise!

[Bicyclists boarding an SL ferry.]

Other public ferry routes serve more distant islands of the Stockholm archipelago for fares that are somewhat higher but still much less than the price of a tourist-oriented harbor cruise.

[One of the participants in an ongoing vigil for asylum for war resisters and refugees outside Parliament House in Stockholm: “Solidarity with all people in flight from war and oppression.” Longstanding policies that made Sweden a haven for war resisters and asylum seekers, from military deserters and draft resisters during the US war in Indochina to refugees from recent wars in Syria and Afghanistan, have come under increasing attack.]

Another challenge for the cast of The Amazing Race 35 in this episode was sorting a load of household trash at one of the recycling centers (“Återvinningscentraler”) where Stockholm residents bring their unwanted items. They had to figure out what category of waste or recycling (food waste, glass, metal, paper, textiles, ceramics, hard plastic, wood, tires, electrical appliances, bicycles, etc.) each item fell into, and where to deposit it.

If you think this is a new idea or something that could happen only in socialist/environmentalist “green-left” Sweden, think again. This system of municipal recycling, in which people bring and sort their own rubbish, has been in operation for more than 50 years in the not-particularly-liberal nor Swedish town of Wellesley, Massachusetts. And the source of its success in Wellesley was neither environmentalism nor socialism but Yankee thrift and fiscal conservatism.

Wellesley is located on a commuter rail line, but it’s an automobile suburb of single-family homes where every family can be expected to have at least one car. Wellesley has never had city-style municipal garbage collection. Each household was (and still is) required to take its own trash to the town dump or pay a private service to take their trash to the dump for them — an expensive option relatively few people chose.

When I was growing up in Wellesley in the 1960s, the town operated its own municipal garbage incinerator to minimize the amount of ash and residual waste it had to find space to dump. I remember going with my parents to the dump, throwing our bags of trash over the railing into the forecourt of the incinerator building, and watching men with front-end loaders push the piles of trash into the flames in the building behind.

That era came to an end in 1971 when some of the first Federal and state environmental laws and regulations came into effect. Upgrading or replacing the incinerator to meet new air pollution limits proved prohibitively expensive on the small scale required for a town with only 25,000 people. The task was complicated by the fact that the dump/incinerator was located in a marshy area (which is why it hadn’t been built up with houses) subject to other new restrictions on water pollution and construction in wetlands. Suddenly the town found itself paying by the ton to have all its trash trucked to an out-of-town landfill.

That same year, a small group of Wellesley women who had been brought together by the first Earth Day in 1970 proposed to set up a volunteer-run recycling project at the dump. The town wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the project at first, but had little to lose. An area was set aside along the approach road to the former incinerator building (now used only as a transfer station for waste en route to the out-of-town landfill) with dumpsters for residents to deposit aluminum, other metal, newspaper, clear glass, brown glass, and green glass — the most easily separated and saleable categories of recyclable materials.

Volunteers — many of them, at first, Wellesley College students — staffed the recycling area on weekends when most people took their trash to the dump, attracting the attention of those passing by on their way to the dumping area for non-recyclables. (“What are those college girls doing at the dump?”) Each person who stopped their car at the recycling area provided an object lesson to others. Recycling was fun for all ages: Flinging bottles into the bins with a satisfying smash was a great way to take out the frustrations of the week!

Members of the Town Meeting quickly realized that, between earnings from the sale of recyclable materials and savings in trucking and landfill fees for material diverted from the waste stream, it was worth having town employees staff the recycling area rather than relying on volunteers, and finding ways to recycle or re-use as much as possible of what would the town would otherwise have to pay to dispose of.

Fifty years later, the Wellesley town dump is a national and international showpiece for the type of recycling system the contestants on The Amazing Race 35 saw this week in Stockholm, handling an even wider range of materials, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenues for the town, and reducing trucking and landfill costs by an even larger amount. The former incinerator building is now the site of the book exchange, while a large tent shelters the seasonal reusables (“free store”) area for games, toys, furniture, working appliances, office equipment and supplies, etc. This video gives a glimpse of the dump/recycling center in operation, while the official smartphone app for the Wellesley dump lists what is accepted for recycling or re-use, and where each type of item goes.

In recycling as in many other fields, we can learn from the ways we see things being done in other countries. But we may also have much to learn from unnoticed examples closer to home.