FACT CHECK: Is it normal to store barrels of shit in Sweden?
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Flemming Hansen and Mette Helbæk, two chefs from Copenhagen, abandoned their purported 'eco-retreat', Stedsans in Halland, last year, leaving behind substantial debts to Swedish and Danish tax authorities and a significant environmental clean-up job.
Commenting on the barrels they left behind, they wrote on social media that "For people in rural Sweden it's a very normal thing. It's also a very important part of the permaculture principles that you deal with your own shit."
The property's new owner, they claimed, had been informed about the barrels and was informed that they could be used as compost on the property.
"Half of them are ready to use this spring, the other half is ready in one year, following the guidelines of Swedish law," they wrote.
So is it normal?
Well, yes actually. It kind of is.
"It's not uncommon to do this: maybe not so much in the Stockholm area. But when you get out in the countryside where you don't have a municipal waste system," explained Charlotte Löfgren, senior advisor for waste collection at Swedish Regions, the umbrella organisation for Sweden's municipalities.
Summer houses in the country in Sweden might have a torrtoalett, where the front part collects urine in one container, and the back part collects poo in a barrel. The urine can normally be deposited on the householder's own land, while the poo will be stored in barrels to be collected by the municipality.
"You need to have a certain type of container for this," she said. "This is very strict, because it has to be safe and it should not leak. No one who picks it up wants to be covered with poo, you know. It's quite regulated. You don't just take a bucket and leave it there."
It's also common to have a composting toilet or mulltoa. Here the latrine is lined with bark mulch, wood chips or peat, which facilitates composting.
This can also be collected by the municipality, but it often composted on the site, and then used to fertilise the surrounding soil.
READ ALSO: Eight tonnes of human faeces spilled in Swedish town
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What are the laws in Sweden?
The main law governing the handling of poo is the Swedish Environmental Code, or Miljöbalken, which gives local municipalities the responsibility for handling "latrine from dry toilets and comparable solutions".
"It is allowed in the legislation but the municipality is allowed to have regulations and these can differ between different municipalities," Löfgren said.
"They might say 'if we're going to collect it from you, you have to provide it in the correct barrel. It cannot weigh more than a certain number of kilograms. It has be available for pickup at a certain place.'"
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Can you compost it yourself?
Hansen and Helbæk claimed in their post that they had been composting the waste themselves for spreading later on.
"You can do that, but then you don't keep it in barrels like that, and you don't have 158 of them," Löfgren said. "Composting is for a summer house that you go to for maybe four weeks a year. It's not for this kind of resort. It's too much. What are you supposed to do with it? You can't spread it out in nature."
In addition, to do this, they would have had to apply for and receive permission from the local municipality, something Daniel Helsing, the head of building and environment at the local Hylte municipality, told the UK's Guardian newspaper Hansen and Helbæk had never done.
"They probably just wanted to skip the cost, because it's expensive to have it picked up by the municipality," Löfgren said.
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