Eleven people, including an entrepreneur who once called herself the “queen of trash”, have gone on trial in Sweden accused of illegally dumping toxic waste in the country’s biggest ever environmental crime case.
The closely watched trial at Attunda district court in Sollentuna, near Stockholm, centres on the recycling company Think Pink, its former chief executive Bella Nilsson, who has since changed her name, and her ex-husband Thomas Nilsson.
Prosecutors have accused the company of dumping and burying waste in 21 locations in Sweden in a way that could harm human health and the environment. All of the defendants deny any wrongdoing.
The case has been in the making for several years and the trial is scheduled to take nine months. Nilsson and her employees were charged in December.
Nilsson was the last of the accused to arrive at the courthouse on Tuesday. Wearing big dark sunglasses, she refused to answer questions as she pushed away reporters’ microphones.
The Nilssons face charges of serious environmental crime and serious economic crime linked to the company, all of which they deny. The others face a combination of different charges, including serious environmental crime, serious economic crime linked to the company, aiding and abetting serious environmental crime and environmental crime.
From 2018-20, the company’s heyday, the trademark pink construction bags of Think Pink, offering cheap recycling and waste disposal, were a common sight in the capital. Nilsson won awards for her work as chief executive.
The business came crashing down in 2020 when its owners were arrested. The company has been accused of dumping at least 200,000 tonnes of waste around Sweden.
Police investigators, whose report runs to 50,000 pages, found harmful levels of arsenic, dioxins, zinc, lead, copper and petroleum products. Several of the rubbish dumps caught fire, with one fire lasting for months.
Anders Gustafsson, one of the trial’s three prosecutors, has described the case as “the largest environmental crime in Sweden in terms of scope and organisation”.
On Tuesday he said Think Pink had dumped rubbish and used falsified documents to deceive authorities and make big profits. “There are claims for damages of 260m SEK [£19m]mainly from municipalities, when they were forced to clear away the large mountains of rubbish,” he told the broadcaster SVT. “It is exceptional that it is on a large scale and that it has been going on for such a long time in several places in the country.”
The senior prosecutor Linda Schön said the investigation had highlighted how ordinary people turned a blind eye to such crimes. “Don’t you think about that when you pay so little for the service? Can what you put in the construction bag even be recycled for that cost? It’s the same as turning a blind eye to who sews our cheap clothes and where,” she told the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
According to the indictment, which covers sites across 15 different municipalities, the main suspects were involved in hauling thousands of tonnes of unsorted construction and demolition waste, which was then buried, wrapped in plastic in bales and used as filling material.
Nilsson, who has changed her name to Fariba Vancor, previously told Swedish media the company acted in line with the law, and said she was the victim of a plot by business rivals. “She has an explanation for all of this,” her lawyer, Jan Tibbling, told the Dagens Nyheter newspaper on Monday.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
