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The story of Swedish waste management in the last forty years is the story of A farewell to landfills. This farewell is paramount to a happy-end tale of sustainability. "Sweden is today recycling 97% of its household waste" (Avfall Sverige, 2010) proudly tells that Sweden has opened an era of sustainable waste management. But is sustainability really so simple? Can there be another side to the story of how Sweden has developed a successful combined policy of incineration, recycling and biological treatments? Could Sweden's pleasant farewell to landfills be a tale that conceals unpleasant things? A critical reading of Sweden's farewell to landfills in the light of ecosophy (Næss, 1989) and the European Waste Directive (European Union, 2008) shows that it is a tale that silences and neutralises alternative views and corporate strategies on waste and sustainability. For example, it is a tale silencing that incineration is a method rejected in many countries, and that not everybody considers energy recovery to be a form of recycling. Moreover, it is a fundamentally anthropocentric tale but that paradoxically ignores the economic and behavioural dynamic that let humans produce waste in the first place. And, it is a tale that labels waste as a resource which is a label that fits better with waste growth than with waste minimisation, despite the fact that the latter is definitely more sustainable than the former. A convincing story of an undeniable success, A farewell to landfills is a feel good story. But feel good stories are conservative stories that invite us to dig us deeper in the cushions of our sofas. The question is whether digging us deeper into the cushion of petty recycling practices can actually stand for a sustainable way of producing and consuming.

Several pressing issues face municipal planners including increased land use and climate change. Managing these issues requires a balance between different actions to accommodate citizen's demands of ecosystem services (ES) and development projects. The implementation of ES as a new tool for assessments needs to be contrasted by research considering existing tools such as Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). ES has been introduced as a policy tool at the governmental level but implementation at the local and regional scale is still needed; municipalities could benefit from collaboration with the research community for state of the art methods. One obstacle for implementation of ES is that it is not always easy for laymen to understand and additionally, the ES concept may be weakly supported by science. The municipalities realize that a society on its way towards sustainability takes advantage of new knowledge and that interactions with research will put them in the forefront of new scientific questions. The municipalities ask for research that takes a citizen perspective and research that prioritizes questions other than pure environmental considerations. Priorities in municipality planning are based on local conditions and rely on EIA. Many ecological indicators are already covered in EIA and this is reflected in Swedish Comprehensive Plans (SCP) documents, yet need further analysis is needed to be a part of ES. The SCPs present concepts at a policy level and rarely provide a more detailed plan of action compatible with the ES approach. We found that the use of ES concepts in Swedish Comprehensive Plans and in EIA is still not common and in need of further support from research and in practice. The EIA is decisive for comprehensive planning documents in the Swedish municipalities and follows standard format over time and between municipalities. ES is focused on human needs while the EIA describes place based assessments on environmental impact rather than feedback to the society by the intervention. ...

Background: Several pressing issues face municipal planners including increased land use and climate change. Managing these issues requires a balance between different actions to accommodate citizen's demands of ecosystem services (ES) and development projects. The implementation of ES as a new tool for assessments needs to be contrasted by research considering existing tools such as Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). ES has been introduced as a policy tool at the governmental level but implementation at the local and regional scale is still needed; municipalities could benefit from collaboration with the research community for state of the art methods. One obstacle for implementation of ES is that it is not always easy for laymen to understand and additionally, the ES concept may be weakly supported by science. The municipalities realize that a society on its way towards sustainability takes advantage of new knowledge and that interactions with research will put them in the forefront of new scientific questions. The municipalities ask for research that takes a citizen perspective and research that prioritizes questions other than pure environmental considerations. Priorities in municipality planning are based on local conditions and rely on EIA. Many ecological indicators are already covered in EIA and this is reflected in Swedish Comprehensive Plans (SCP) documents, yet need further analysis is needed to be a part of ES. The SCPs present concepts at a policy level and rarely provide a more detailed plan of action compatible with the ES approach. New information: We found that the use of ES concepts in Swedish Comprehensive Plans and in EIA is still not common and in need of further support from research and in practice. The EIA is decisive for comprehensive planning documents in the Swedish municipalities and follows standard format over time and between municipalities. ES is focused on human needs while the EIA describes place based assessments on environmental impact rather than feedback to the society by the intervention. Municipalities of south Sweden ask for research support in many different areas, for instance how to set up proper organization for implementation of ES and environmental issues, but priorities are based on their local conditions. The results shows that collaboration between stakeholders and researchers is needed which can create incentives, so that the decisions made by individuals, communities, corporations, and governments may be able to promote widely shared values compatible with ES. Researchers and municipalities who work on an operational level face many challenges in promoting greater use of the ES approach, with some of them yet to be defined. We conclude that implementation of ES could draw from lessons learned in the use of EIA. Further, it is presented that ES has the potential for greater public and stakeholder feedback into decisions as compared to EIA. ; ECOSIMP

Transdisciplinary research and collaboration iswidely acknowledged as a critical success factor for solution-oriented approaches that can tackle complex sustainabilitychallenges, such as biodiversity loss, pollution, andclimate-related hazards. In this context, city governments'engagement in transdisciplinarity is generally seen as a keycondition for societal transformation towards sustainability.However, empirical evidence is rare. This paper presentsa self-assessment of a joint research project onecosystem services and climate adaptation planning(ECOSIMP) undertaken by four universities and sevenSwedish municipalities. We apply a set of design principlesand guiding questions for transdisciplinary sustainabilityprojects and, on this basis, identify key aspects for supporting university–municipality collaboration. Weshow that: (1) selecting the number and type of projectstakeholders requires more explicit consideration of thepurpose of societal actors' participation; (2) concrete,interim benefits for participating practitioners and organisationsneed to be continuously discussed; (3) promotingthe 'inter', i.e., interdisciplinary and inter-city learning, cansupport transdisciplinarity and, ultimately, urban sustainabilityand long-term change. In this context, we found thatdesign principles for transdisciplinarity have the potentialto (4) mitigate project shortcomings, even when transdisciplinarityis not an explicit aim, and (5) address differencesand allow new voices to be heard. We proposeadditional guiding questions to address shortcomings andinspire reflexivity in transdisciplinary projects.

Transdisciplinary research and collaboration is widely acknowledged as a critical success factor for solution-oriented approaches that can tackle complex sustainability challenges, such as biodiversity loss, pollution, and climate-related hazards. In this context, city governments' engagement in transdisciplinarity is generally seen as a key condition for societal transformation towards sustainability. However, empirical evidence is rare. This paper presents a self-assessment of a joint research project on ecosystem services and climate adaptation planning (ECOSIMP) undertaken by four universities and seven Swedish municipalities. We apply a set of design principles and guiding questions for transdisciplinary sustainability projects and, on this basis, identify key aspects for supporting university-municipality collaboration. We show that: (1) selecting the number and type of project stakeholders requires more explicit consideration of the purpose of societal actors' participation; (2) concrete, interim benefits for participating practitioners and organisations need to be continuously discussed; (3) promoting the 'inter', i.e., interdisciplinary and inter-city learning, can support transdisciplinarity and, ultimately, urban sustainability and long-term change. In this context, we found that design principles for transdisciplinarity have the potential to (4) mitigate project shortcomings, even when transdisciplinarity is not an explicit aim, and (5) address differences and allow new voices to be heard. We propose additional guiding questions to address shortcomings and inspire reflexivity in transdisciplinary projects.