Sweden's Gold Medal Winning Eco-Town

It is often said that our greatest successes arrive after our darkest hours.

 

The Hammarby Sjöstad eco-town is located a few kilometres south of Stockholm's city centre. It was developed for the 2004 Olympics but they failed to host the event. What was once potentially a temporary Olympic village is now a permanent and attractive lakeside community of 35,000 people. There are 11,000 flats and 10,000 working people and you can see a lot of people going to work using public transport, bicycles and carpools rather than by individually driving cars.

 

There is a recycling room in every building. There isn't any food waste in this town because they convert food waste into “biogas”, the purest environmental oil. They don't waste water, either. They use waste water to heat their houses. There are some nature parks and they have a lot of green areas.

 

There is a special recycling system in this town. They collect different waste at different times, so there are only a few trucks in the area at the same time. Another feature of this town is their water system. With low flushing toilets and aerated taps, they use very little water.

 

UN Habitat predicts that by 2050, 5.3 billion people, or '70% of the world’s population, will live in urban areas. If we want to avoid catastrophic climate change, we will need to see many more Hammarby-style arrangements.