More ways to sort household waste as Iceland's largest landfill winds down

In December 2023, Iceland's largest landfill, Alfsnes, shut down most of its operations, accepting only materials that could not be recycled, such as fishing nets and asbestos.

- Ezekiel Sen

Since then, people have had to step up to cope with the two ways in which the country now manages its refuse recycling or exporting it abroad, to be incinerated for energy production, for instance.

The Alfsnes landfill is located just north of Reykjavik and used to take in the waste of two-thirds of the country's nearly 390,000 people.

It was run by the country's largest waste management company, government partner Sorpa.

Sorpa handles about 200,000 tonnes of waste annually, most of which used to get dumped at Alfsnes.

Iceland still has about 14 working landfills and one incinerator.

But the landfills are small, each serving less than 5 per cent of the population, while the incinerator is reserved only for hazardous waste, such as used syringes.

Unlike other countries with landfill bans such as Sweden which opts to incinerate its rubbish for energy, Iceland rejected incineration for three reasons: expense, the cost to the environment, and a plentiful supply of energy generated from geothermal sources.

Instead, all biodegradable waste is now trucked to Gaja, a composting and biogas plant located at Alfsnes, which is also run by Sorpa.

The plant opened in 2021 at the Alfsnes site to prepare for the eventual shutdown of the landfill.

As for the rest of the waste generated, an even greater proportion of what is non-biodegradable is now exported.