Sweden is about as close as socialists will get to Utopia.  The country is often held up as the paragon of what all civilized nations should be, particularly when it comes to climate change and why governments should force their citizens to recycle.  In Sweden, you have to recycle just about everything, and this can take a lot of time.

So what do you do with your waste? Most homes have a number of trash bins for different kinds of trash: batteries in one; biodegradables in one; wood in one; colored glass in one, other glass in another; aluminum in one, other metals in another; newspapers in one, hard paper in another, and paper that doesn’t fit these two categories in a third; and plastic of all sorts in another collection of bins. The materials generally have to be cleaned before thrown away – milk cartons with milk in them cannot be recycled just as metal cans cannot have too much of the paper labels left.

Per Bylund, the Swede (and American Ph.D. student) who wrote the article, says that the success story of recycling in Sweden is really just a myth, and he tells us why.   This post isn’t slinging mud at well-intended governments.  It’s slinging mud at well-intended governments that obfuscate information about their coercive policies meant for the greater good.