Swedish Guys Getting Greener

From Swedish short film, "Music for one apartment and six drummers"

As treehuggers are probably starting to realize, the Swedes are very fond of researching their green habits, or the lack of them. Just in the least few days, for example, reports were released in Sweden showing women are greener than men (though men are supposedly catching up), people are buying more eco-cars (over 27,000 registered last month), and it shouldn't be a problem to build a whopping 30 TWh of new wind power in Sweden over the next dozen years (that's a three-fold increase from the previous goal for wind of 10 TWh by 2015).

Of course, surveys don't tell the whole truth, but still the news is encouraging. Media coverage of climate change has caused more people, and especially more men, to become environmentally conscious, according to Länsförsäkringar, an association of Swedish insurers. Swedes seem generally open to culture-changing initiatives when it comes to the environment - the Moderate-led coalition government recently proposed higher gas taxes to help reduce CO2 emissions, and the proposal is getting widespread support. Since last year's Länsfösäkringar survey, the number of men who think green when deciding how to heat their homes (now 59 percent) and which car to buy (now 49 percent) jumped around ten percentage points. And fully 90 percent of both men and women surveyed say they sort their trash for recycling - that's equivalent to 230 kilos of trash recycled for every man, woman and child. Swedes are the best recyclers in Europe. The positive numbers drop considerably, however, when men or women consider their purchases of bank services, insurance, and strangely enough, home decoration (!) where the percentages hover between 20 and 25 percent. Via The Local (in English)