By Sophie EastaughFeatures correspondent

The remote Danish island of Bornholm has pledged to eliminate trash by 2032. How will it get there?

On the Danish island of Bornholm, locals say you're not a true Bornholmer until your family have lived here for three generations. They're fiercely proud and you can see why. This small, diamond-shaped island of 40,000 people in the Baltic Sea is famous for its unspoiled nature, quaint fishing villages and arts and crafts tradition. With the claim that it enjoys more sunshine hours than anywhere else in Denmark, it's known as "the sunshine island", and draws thousands of tourists each year.

But the island has had its fair share of problems too. In the 70s and 80s its economy was heavily dependent on fishing, but as fish stocks in the Baltic Sea gradually collapsed and Denmark privatised quotas, many small-scale fishers were wiped out. Bornholm had to reinvent itself. The island is considered deprived by Danish standards – locals here earn around 20% less than the Danish average.

Fast-forward to 2018 and Jens Hjul-Nielsen had an idea. A civil servant head-hunted to lead the island's waste authority, Bornholm’s Affaldsbehandling (BOFA), he was tired of Bornholm always being on the back foot. "When we went to the central administration in Copenhagen, our message was pretty much always the same: 'we're from Bornholm, we have difficulties with this, that or the other, can you help us in some way?' - very often with money," he says. "And I was thinking, instead of always being the ones who show up and say, 'we have a problem', what if we were the ones who showed up and said 'we have a solution for the rest of you'?"

That solution is a bold one – the island has pledged to go zero waste, meaning no waste will be burned or landfilled by 2032. (Listen here to how Bornholm is aiming for zero waste).

2032 is also the year that Bornholm's incinerator, which currently burns nearly all of the rubbish that can't be recycled, will reach the end of its life. Instead of replacing it, Hjul-Nielsen thought, why not do away with it all together?

It's a huge challenge, not least because the Danes produce among the most waste per person in the European Union, and are among the highest waste producers in the world. This is because Denmark is "trapped by incineration," according to Paul Connett, waste management expert and former professor of environmental chemistry at St Lawrence University in New York. "I think they probably don't see this as throwing away. They're persuaded that this is good behaviour," he says.

That's because Denmark has 23 state-of-the-art incinerators which burn the waste produced by Danes, and imported from elsewhere, and converts it into energy that helps power the country's district heating systems and electricity grid. This "waste-to-energy" strategy positioned Denmark as a global front-runner in diverting waste from landfill and has in the past been praised as a greener solution for trash. However, burning rubbish still emits greenhouse gases, which isn't helping Denmark's climate goal of cutting its emissions by 70% by 2030. It also saves far less energy and resources than recycling – all reasons why the government wants to reduce incineration by a third by 2030.

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On Bornholm, Jens says about 70% of the 80,000 tonnes of waste that BOFA receives each year is currently recycled. Around 25% is incinerated and the last 5%, mostly toxic materials that can't be burned, ends up in landfill.

The zero waste goal also isn't the island's only green pledge - it's aiming to become carbon neutral in its energy sector as soon as 2025 (Listen here to how Bornholm plans to rid itself of fossil fuels). The island already gets most of its electricity and heating from a combination of wind power, solar, biogas and sustainable biomass, with plans to install more renewable energy in the next 18 months.  

On a sunny Monday morning, BOFA's recycling centre in the island's main town of Ronne is busy with families arriving in cars and trucks, sorting their waste into 37 categories to be recycled, including some more unusual ones like windows, toilets and televisions.

One of the main strategies of Bornholm's zero waste vision is to harness the potential of organic waste, or biomass. David Christensen, zero waste project manager at BOFA, is testing this out with a pilot project making compost out of a particularly hard to recycle item – nappies. Most disposable nappies are made from non-biodegradable materials and end up in landfill, where they can take up to 500 years to break down.

CARBON COUNT

The reporting for this story was conducted while the writer was on another assignment. The travel included a return flight, train and ferry, but as it was not the primary purpose of the trip, we have not counted the carbon emitted from the flight in our calculations. For the record, however, the carbon emissions from the flight were 530kg. The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Find out more about how we calculated this figure here.

"It's funny because back when we launched the vision, one of the most common ways people liked to [have a] dig at us was by saying, 'What are you going to do about the diapers?'," says Christensen. "They're made up of petrochemicals and polymers and they're very difficult to do anything with other than incinerating or landfilling them. Here we're testing technology that could potentially disrupt the whole system."

David is using a special type of 100% compostable diaper made from cellulose, a compound found in plants, and biodegradable plant-based plastics. The diapers are collected from kindergartens and shredded down, then mixed in a big metal silo with other types of organic waste, including garden waste and leftover grains from a local brewery. The mixture is first heated to 70C (158F) for an hour in order to sanitise it. Then after just 10 days in the silo, there's no trace of diaper and it's potentially safe to be used as a compost in agriculture. "The regular composting that we do on site with the mountains of garden waste takes around 10 to 12 months," says Christensen. "So this really speeds it up massively. Of course, it requires an energy input. But otherwise, it's a game changer." As Bornholm's grid is largely powered by renewables, the composting machine has a low carbon footprint.

Sitting among the island's sweeping green fields and occasional windmills, you can spot what looks like a giant, 20m (66ft) tall white balloon. It's a biogas plant, which turns some of the island's vast quantities of pig waste into a renewable gas that's used for heating and electricity. Pig farming is a huge industry on Bornholm, where 500,000 pigs are slaughtered each year. The plant processes 120,000 tonnes of organic waste annually, producing enough gas to power nearly a fifth of the island's homes. "It's mainly manure from cows and pigs," says plant manager Georg Koefoed. "It's slaughterhouse waste, and we get some industrial wastes as well, like oil or apple pulp."

The first part of the process is similar to the compostable nappies – the waste must be sanitised at 70C (158F). It then gets eaten by bacteria which produce gas at the top, which is converted into electricity via a generator. The remaining sludge, known as digestate, goes back to the farmers to be used as fertiliser. The plant can only process about 20% of the island's pig waste, so it has applied to the local government to expand to four times its current size. But some climate-conscious Bornholmers worry that the expansion could lock the island into animal farming for years to come – a concern when meat production is one of the biggest drivers of climate change worldwide.

"Well that's another argument, correct," says Koefoed. "But we have so much waste on Bornholm, like in the rest of Denmark. And in the future, we want to use this gas for heavy transport. A lot of companies are looking for alternative fuels for ships and flights. There will be a huge demand." Koefoed also argues that if people ate less meat, the plant could easily switch to using vegetable waste, from industrial greenhouses for example. "We can use all organic mass. I think we have to fit our plans into the future."

Turning organic waste into biogas is gaining popularity around the world. In the Indian city of Hyderabad, around 10 metric tonnes a day of fruit and vegetable waste from Bowenpally Market is being turned into electricity, and the country's biogas sector is set to get big investments in the coming years. It's not a perfect solution, as the gas is made up of methane and carbon dioxide, two planet-warming gases. But since those greenhouse gases would have been emitted anyway as the waste breaks down in landfill, creating biogas reduces those emissions while also replacing the need for carbon-intensive fossil fuels.

Bornholm is looking to eliminate other types of rubbish besides organic waste, some of which depends on a cultural shift. Achieving zero waste isn't just about recycling and reusing objects, but also about reducing the amount of stuff we buy in the first place. In the centre of Ronne, Lene Green Olssen is busy unpacking cardboard boxes in the new, larger premises of her second-hand shop. Bornholmers can pay to rent a shelf to display their unwanted objects, which Green Olssen sells for a small commission. Business is booming, she says. "We're almost fully booked. It's got bigger and bigger, especially for clothes. That's why I had to move."

Green Olssen also started a Facebook group for giving away unwanted objects for free, which she named '"Last stop before BOFA", after the island's recycling centre. In five years it's grown to 12,800 members – around half the adults on the island. People post anything from toys, to bicycles, to food that's going to waste. "I'm so proud of them!" says Green Olssen. "I thought maybe it's for people who haven't got so much money, but that's not correct. It's everybody, and that warms my heart."

One of the limitations of Bornholm's zero waste strategy is that with only 40,000 inhabitants, the island doesn't have the scale of waste to recycle materials locally, aside from metal. The different categories of recycling have to be shipped to companies in Denmark, Germany and Sweden, which comes with a carbon cost. Hjul-Nielsen says another challenge comes from items composed of many different materials, which makes them difficult to recycle. "A shampoo bottle can consist of four or five different kinds of plastic," he says. "We need help from the producers. And if they're unwilling, then from legislators. One solution would be that you simply do not let this product come into the market at all."

While the compostable diaper project offers a promising solution for sanitary waste, Christensen acknowledges that in order to truly have no waste, all the babies on the island would have to use the special nappies, which are more expensive. Then there are toxic materials that can't yet be recycled, such as construction and demolition waste, or asbestos. Bornholm's mayor, Jacob Trøst, hopes that technologies will emerge that will help the island towards its goal – but, he's realistic about the enormity of the challenge.

"You know the saying, 'you need to aim for the stars if you want to hit the treetops'. I think it's good to be very ambitious in this field. It makes everybody work on the goal," he says.

To achieve this goal, BOFA's current focus is on expanding its household collection service so that more recycling categories are collected from homes, rather than relying on people to come to its centres. It's also prioritising the education of young people as part of its strategy, with school children receiving outreach sessions about the circular economy and classes in what David describes as "green mindset" training. The island has launched a zero waste innovation and partnerships platform, which encourages companies with design or technology solutions such as the nappy project to come forward and collaborate with them.

"The good progress is starting," says Connett, who also authored the book The Zero Waste Solution: Untrashing the Planet One Community at a Time. "I would say the island should be pretty confident about getting up to 80% recycling rate, using all the standard techniques. The last 20% is about industrial redesign. A community cannot get to zero waste alone."

Connett has been to over 69 countries to campaign against incineration and promote zero waste strategies. He helped the Italian town of Capannori, the first town in Europe to declare a zero waste goal, and the Japanese town of Kamikatsu, which both now have recycling rates of over 80%. Since these efforts kicked off, hundreds of zero waste initiatives have been adopted in towns and cities across Europe, including the island of Sardinia. While some define zero waste in the most literal way, Connett says it’s an approach that should be viewed in a broader sense.

"It means a willingness to move in the right direction, which not only means reducing, reusing, recycling, and composting, and all those good things. It means research to get industry to play its part," he says. "And of course, you've got to recognise that a little island in the Baltic can't wag the tails very easily of major corporations producing throw away garbage. But working together, we can put enormous pressure on industry."

"More than anything else, it's a willingness to move in the right direction. And a willingness to recognise a moral imperative here, that we move our society towards sustainability."

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