Everyday sustainability

It is early morning, and 31-year-old Daniel Silberstein collects his bike from the storeroom in his block of flats, but not before he has separated out his empty cartons and packaging into the containers in the shared basement. It is just some of the two tonnes of rubbish he and his fellow Swedes recycle per person each year.

‘The thing about recycling is that it’s quite mechanical’, he says. ‘It’s basically just this thing you automatically do where you sort your rubbish – just another part of all the consumption we do in our daily lives’, Silberstein says. He lives in a central Stockholm flat with his partner and daughter Charlie.

‘A big part of it is thinking about what kind of environment our daughter is going to have in the future. I am a kid of the 1990s and not recycling is kind of abnormal for us, but for Charlie’s generation it will hopefully go even further. She already thinks it’s fun to push the cartons into the recycling station when I take her.’