“Nordic Waste” or the return of the repressed: A mountain of waste sliding towards us

A couple of kilometers from where I was born and raised, just south of the city of Randers in Denmark, a mountain of toxic soil is right now slowly sliding towards a nearby stream and small village, threatening to pollute the stream (and the adjacent fjord and eventually the sea), and destroy the surrounding land and the village.

A company, “Nordic Waste”, has for years made profits from receiving toxic soil from all over Denmark and abroad, but cleaned and returned very little of this. Toxic waste and profits have accumulated together, but whereas the profits have been paid out to the company’s shareholders on an ongoing basis, the toxic soil has been sitting there, slowly building up, with recent, excessive rainfall destabilizing it.

The company has now declared bankruptcy, and with little capital on the books (most of it paid out as profits to very wealthy individuals), the enormous costs of cleaning up the mess will be socialized (= taxpayers), and the local community and environment will likely suffer for years.

Stories surface about lack of oversight and enforcement of environmental regulation by the local municipality, and as the mountain of dirt edges closer and closer towards the stream and the city, the story has become a matter of national interest, with our prime minister visiting the site just yesterday, displaying a will to act in the time of crisis.

But the state cannot really act, because the company and its owners are no longer responsible as per Danish corporate law. Our prime minister therefore invokes ethics – that the owners have a moral obligation to pay for the clean-up, but again, as long as there are no options for legal recourse, it’s up to the company’s owners and their moral, i.e., to prioritize the environment and the health of the local inhabitants instead of profits. In Denmark, the polluter apparently doesn’t have to pay.

Meanwhile, the mountain keeps sliding towards the stream and the village.

As some will already have guessed, this story is quite analogous to the human predicament in 2024. We find ourselves in a fundamental, ecological overshoot, the symptoms being severe and wide-spread climate impacts, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem degradation.

Over the course of the last approx. 150 years, since the industrialization took off, we have accumulated gigantic mountains of waste (greenhouse gas pollution, plastics, toxins, etc.) and plundered ecosystems while reaping the monetary profits associated with a wholly unsustainable production of energy, food, and goods and services. And these mountains of waste are now looming in the horizon, sliding towards us, picking up pace every day, unfairly affecting the poorest communities first.

While the mountain of toxic dirt outside of the city of Randers doesn’t grow anymore, because disaster has struck, and good people are doing everything they can to mitigate and adapt to the unfolding catastrophe, we still – at a global level – keep adding mountains of waste to our climate and environment, in an act of neglect or perhaps outright repression, since scientists have been pointing to the mountains of waste for decades. But, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, the repressed will always return in some shape, way or form. 

Stating the blatantly obvious: There is an extremely urgent need to rethink and reform our economy (including stronger regulation of corporate responsibility and accountability), aligning it with planetary boundaries in a fair and socially just way. If we don’t do this, you can expect a mountain of shit soon coming to a community near you…

Read more about the story here: Nordic Waste