Gislaved's environmental adviser warns: "Swedish environmental work is very slow"

In the clip above you can see the tip of the iceberg of an old garbage dump buried under Gislaved.

Environmental consultant Volker Kelm says that Sweden's municipalities must get better cooperation with the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and county administrative boards to deal with so-called contaminated areas. By a contaminated area is meant that there are pollutants in the soil that the community has stored, for example it can be an old waste dump under the soil on which we walk.

- These are old sins, says Volker Kelm.

Gislaved is one of many municipalities that may find it difficult to process their suspected contaminated areas in the coming years because there is no money, he says.

- This is not just a problem in Gislaved. It is very slow throughout Sweden, if we learn from the Netherlands and Belgium we will go very far, he says.

The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency also wrote in an information brochure in 2018 that the Netherlands is a country that is considered to be far ahead in terms of remediation of contaminated areas.

- Other countries have skipped Sweden in environmental work, for example, the Netherlands is already done with its remediation, says Volker Kelm.

Soil pollution is one reason why Gislaved Municipality cannot build housing and parks to the extent desired. The municipality has plans for, for example, Anderstorp but at present it is only a dream.

- We want to build really nice parks and maybe residential areas, but we can't do that today, we can't even make a detailed plan according to the law, but we have to deal with soil pollution first, he says.