Lauren Boland reports from Finland:
ON THE OUTSKIRTS of a small Finnish city, 100km north of Helsinki, is a growing hill of scrap wood. Furniture, fences, crates – all of them are tossed onto the heap.
A steady stream of people come and go to discard the wood they’re finished with. One man drives up in a car, pulling a small trailer full of wood behind him. One by one, he takes out planks of wood and sends them whizzing onto the pile like frisbees.
It’s a rainy day in October but the collection isn’t an early venture for a Halloween bonfire. It’s a small section of a 70-hectare waste management centre in Lahti, the European Green Capital of 2021.
Named by the European Commission as the continent’s Green Capital for its carbon reduction plans, protection of nature and water, air quality and more, Lahti has set a target of reaching almost net-zero emissions by 2025, ten years ahead of Finland as a whole and more than two decades before Ireland and the EU.
The Journal visited Lahti this week for a closer look at its climate policies in action.
‘Environmental action makes a city better’
With a population nearly the size of Cork city’s, Lahti would not always have been a contender to be a Green Capital. The nearby Lake Vesijärvi was once one of the most polluted lakes in Finland, with the land around its south-eastern shore a “derelict industrial area”, according to Lahti’s mayor, Pekka Timonen.
Now, 50 years later, the area is home to a harbour, restaurants, a concert hall and swimmers dipping in the lake in summer.
The city introduced a project to clean up Lake Vesijärvi in 1987 and more environmental policies started to take shape in the 1990s. By 2009, the city had set a target of cutting its emissions in half by 2025 compared to 1990. Today, more than two years out from that original deadline, it has already reduced its emissions by 70%.
That’s happened through a combination of factors like waste management; a focus on green space and forests; a redesign of the public transport network; the creation of Finland’s first regional roadmap for circular economy; and ditching coal for renewable energy sources.
The city’s concert hall is home to the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, which set a goal in 2015 of becoming the first carbon-neutral symphony orchestra in the world by carefully managing its energy, water, waste, promotion and travel.
Similarly, its ice hockey team, the Lahti Pelicans, is trying to be the world’s first carbon-neutral hockey team – from cycling and taking public transport to training and games, to plastic-free packaging from its catering company, to clean energy sources powering its ice hockey rink.
“The people of Lahti are a very concrete example of how environmental action makes a city better,” Mayor Timonen said.
On the surface, Lahti doesn’t particularly look like what might be expected of a Green Capital; there’s still a significant number of fossil-powered vehicles and the buildings look the same as anywhere else. It’s teeming with trees, but that’s true for most of Finland.
“People who come here say ‘where are the fancy looking buildings with green roofs and interesting art? Where are the strange-looking cars on the streets?’” the mayor said.
“We would like to have them but it’s not about that. Carbon-neutral Lahti will look exactly like it looks today. It’s a systemic change.”
Globally, much of the change that needs to be done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions comes down to decarbonising energy systems by replacing fossil fuels with renewable sources. Ireland’s target for 2030 is for up to 80% of electricity to come from renewables.
Most of Lahti’s electricity comes from a range of renewable sources – recycled fuel, nuclear power, wind, hydro and bio energy – and its district heating system relies on biomass and solid recycled fuel. Both still use a small amount of gas, but it’s an almost imperceptible portion.
Lahti is only a two-hour journey by road from the Russian border, or four and a half from the city of Saint Petersburg, and, like elsewhere in Europe, is bearing the brunt of increased energy costs due to Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Lahti Energia customers were dealt a 15% increase on their bills, according to CEO Jouni Haikarainen. Although gas is only a minor part of its energy mix, the pressure across the market has seen demand for biofuels and other renewable sources rise, meaning Lahti has needed to “work harder” to get them.
On its doorstep, though, is a new power plant called Kymijärvi III that’s heating the city with biofuel. It replaced the older, coal-fired Kymijärvi I in 2020, reducing the energy provider’s emissions by 600,000 tonnes per year.
High on Finland’s climate agenda is developing a circular economy – that is, one in which materials are used and reused sustainably instead of constantly creating massive amounts of waste.
Ireland introduced legislation for a circular economy for the first time earlier this year. The bill, signed into law by President Michael D Higgins in July, contains measures on segregating commercial waste, using CCTV footage to tackle illegal dumping and littering, and prohibiting the extraction of (or exploration for) coal, though much of that was overshadowed by the public debate about the 20c charge it introduced on disposable coffee cups.
Finland has been working on its circular economy since 2016, with multiple deals signed between the government and sectoral representatives in areas such as construction, vehicles and plastics, according to an official from the Ministry for Environment.
In urban areas of Finland, properties with more than five households, such as apartment blocks, are required to sort their waste into seven different bins – paper, carton packaging, glass packaging, metal, plastic packaging, bio-waste and mixed waste. (Smaller properties are required only to sort between bio and mixed waste).
At Lahti’s Kujala Waste Centre, households pay an annual fee of €33.50 to drop off their waste, where more than 40 categories of waste – like the pile of wood – are separated to be treated, recycled, re-used, composted, or incinerated for biofuel.
Development Manager Kimmo Rinne said that the centre records around 100,000 waste disposal visits each year.
“They are smart people – they want to leave nature for the future,” Rinne said.
Prior to 2001, much of Finland’s waste went directly to landfill. Over the last two decades, the use of waste materials as a fuel source expanded massively, but there’s still a distance to go on recycling. The current recycling rate stands at around 41%, but as an EU member, it needs to reach 65% for municipal waste by 2035.
Like Ireland, Lahti has numbers upon numbers – reducing this, increasing that, the cost of this, the emissions of that. Ultimately, though, it’s not what happens on paper that matters but how it plays out in practice.
“Lahti has set very ambitious goals – but it’s not only [about] setting the goals, but reaching them,” Mayor Timonen said.
The city’s global standing on climate action is the fruit of “all the action” it has taken, he said.
“Not only great plans or ambitious goals – but actions.”
‘Already seeing the effects of climate change’
Lahti’s climate efforts are ahead of the curb but Finland as a whole is trying to keep pace. Between 2005 and 2019, Finland’s per capita emissions decreased by 26%, compared to the EU average decrease of 21%.
In Ireland, per capita emissions decreased more quickly than the EU average between 2005 and 2011 before increasing between 2011 and 2016. They began to decrease from 2016, but were still the second highest in the EU in 2019.
The Finnish population has become more conscious of climate action in recent years as the impacts of the climate crisis crystallise, according to Riikka Yliluoma, a special advisor to Finland’s Minister for Environment.
“I think we are already seeing the effects quite a lot,” Yliluoma said.
“Especially in the north. We have the indigenous people, Sami people, and I think they have already witnessed quite a lot of changes in their livelihoods. It’s very difficult for them because they have traditional livelihoods and their culture is linked to them.
“It impacts our nature, like what kind of species live where. Some species try to migrate to the north,” she said.
“The tics, the little insects, which carry some disease – ten or twenty years ago we only saw them in the southern parts of Finland but now they are also in Lapland, so they migrated quite fast because of the warming environment.”
And in agriculture, changing weather patterns mean that some years receive high levels of rainfall but others are warmer and drier, creating problems for farmers.
Finland’s greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 9% between 2019 and 2020, which is partly attributable to the Covid-19 pandemic and a year of particularly warm weather.
However, in 2021, they fell only slightly by 0.2%. For the first time, the land use and forestry sector was a net source of emissions – usually, it takes in and holds more carbon than it emits, but last year it was a net source of 2.1 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
“Usually our land use sector has been a massive sink but for the first time it’s an emissions source. Our forests still were a sink but not a big enough sink to compensate for our emissions from the land-use sector – for example, from peat,” Yliluoma said.
The ministry is expecting to receive the results next month of a study that was commissioned to look at why the land-use sector became a source of emissions.
“I think this land-use sector is the first priority. When we get the understanding of what has happened there, we need to collect a roadmap, a package, of how to fix the situation,” Yliluoma said.
“Then the next priority with the current energy situation is to boost as much as we can the clean energy and build new infrastructure for clean energy… for example, something we might need to take a look at it is offshore wind. We have some plans already for the offshore wind but this is something we could also support maybe more,” she said.
“The third thing is we need not to be sidetracked from the climate work by the energy crisis, so we need to keep a clear focus.
“Some people say the energy prices are high because of the green transition but in reality it’s the fossil fuels that are driving this crisis and we need to keep our heads straight and see the root causes. I think that’s one of the priorities. We have a good road ahead of us but we need to stick to it.”
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