two sides of a trash problem

The other day i picked up an issue of the magazine “Czech Buisiness Weekly” (CBW) at the Pink Floyd bar in downtown Prague.

It was mostly filled with articles regarding the Czech presidency for the European Union and the economic crisis. But in the editorial i found an interesting side effect of the global economic slowdown. A garbage crisis!

That is, the Czechs used to export a lot of garbage to China! And now due to the economic crisis China, the worlds biggest buyer of “secondary raw materials”. Have stopped buying and transporting garbage to China. I guess they don’t expect to refine so much Czech trash into Chinese trash and export it back to Europe.

Strangely enough a couple of days later i read as they used to do about the opposite problem in Gothenburg, Sweden. During the last six months the Swedish garbage production has dropped by 20%. So now there isn’t enough garbage to feed the remote heating system in Gothenburg. According to Dagens Industri they have started to import garbage from Norway and Holland to keep the Swedes warm.

So Swedish tourists visiting Prague, please bring your garbage with you back home and you will help two nations