Eleven people, including a businesswoman who once called herself the “garbage queen,” have been put on trial in Sweden on charges of illegally dumping toxic waste in the country’s biggest environmental crime ever.
The closely watched trial at Attunda District Court in Sollentuna, near Stockholm, centres on the recycling company Think Pink, its former CEO Bella Nilsson, who has since changed her name, and her ex-husband Thomas Nilsson.
Prosecutors have accused the company of dumping and burying waste at 21 locations in Sweden in a way that could harm human health and the environment. All defendants deny any wrongdoing.
The case has been in the works for several years and the trial is expected to last nine months. Nilsson and his employees were charged in December.
Nilsson was the last of the defendants to arrive at the courthouse on Tuesday. Wearing large dark sunglasses, she refused to answer questions as she pushed away reporters’ microphones.
The Nilssons are charged with serious environmental crimes and serious economic crimes related to the company, all crimes they deny. The others are charged with a combination of different charges, including serious environmental crimes, serious economic crimes related to the company, aiding and abetting serious environmental crimes and environmental crimes.
From 2018 to 2020, the company’s heyday, Think Pink’s pink construction bags, offering low-cost recycling and waste disposal, were a common sight in the capital. Nilsson has won awards for his work as CEO.
The business collapsed in 2020 when its owners were arrested. The company was accused of dumping at least 200,000 tons of waste in Sweden.
Police investigators, whose report is 50,000 pages long, found harmful levels of arsenic, dioxin, zinc, lead, copper and petroleum products. Several landfills caught fire, and one blaze burned for months.
Anders Gustafsson, one of the three prosecutors in the trial, described the case as “the largest environmental crime in Sweden in terms of scale and organization.”
On Tuesday, he said that Think Pink had dumped garbage and used falsified documents to deceive authorities and make huge profits. “There are claims for damages of 260 million Swedish kronor [£19m]mainly by municipalities, when they were forced to clear away the huge mountains of rubbish,” he told broadcaster SVT. “It’s remarkable that it’s on such a large scale and that it’s been going on for so long in several places across the country.”
Chief prosecutor Linda Schön said the investigation showed how ordinary people turned a blind eye to such crimes. “Don’t you think about it when you pay so little for the service? What you put in the construction sack can be recycled for that price? It’s like turning a blind eye to who sews our cheap clothes and where,” she told the newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
According to the indictment, which covers sites in 15 different municipalities, the main suspects were involved in the transportation of thousands of tons of unsorted construction and demolition waste, which was then buried, wrapped in plastic bales and used as fill material.
Nilsson, who changed her name to Fariba Vancor, previously told Swedish media that the company had acted in line with the law and said it was the victim of a plot by business rivals. “She has an explanation for all this,” her lawyer, Jan Tibbling, told the newspaper Dagens Nyheter on Monday.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
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