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Did You Know?

Sweden Invented a Day That Has Existed Exactly Once

Less than 1% of Swedish household waste goes to landfill.

The rest is recycled, composted, or burned for energy in the country's 33 or 34 waste-to-energy plants. Roughly half of household waste is incinerated; the heat feeds district heating networks that warm well over a million homes, and one plant in Stockholm alone heats about 190,000 of them. The share of household waste recycled or recovered has gone from about 38% in 1975 to around 99% today. The average Swede still produces 467 kg of waste a year.

Sweden also imports rubbish. Somewhere between 800,000 and 1.9 million tonnes a year, from the UK, Norway, Ireland and Italy, who pay roughly $43 a tonne for the service. It earns Sweden around $100 million annually. In 2016, imported waste made up 20–25% of everything burned.

Which brings us to the interesting part, because the story everyone tells about this is wrong.

You will read constantly that Sweden ran out of rubbish and has to import other countries' waste to keep its plants running. It is a wonderful image and it is not true. Anna-Carin Gripwall of Avfall Sverige, the Swedish waste management association, told The Independent in 2016 that the plants could run on biofuel instead — and confirmed to Snopes again in December 2025 that this is still the case. Swedenergy says the same.

Sweden does not import trash because it needs to. It imports trash because other countries pay it to.

The clock: Sweden has form for a famous fact that turns out to be more complicated.

When the rest of Europe was arguing about the Gregorian calendar, Sweden came up with what sounded like a sensible compromise. Rather than deleting ten days in one go, it would ease across gradually: skip every leap day for forty years, and by around 1740 the calendar would have quietly slid into alignment with nobody noticing.

Sweden skipped the leap day in 1700 as planned.

Then the Great Northern War started, and Sweden had other things on its mind, and it forgot to skip 1704. Then it forgot again in 1708.

The country was now in a position no other country in history has occupied: one day ahead of the Julian calendar, ten days behind the Gregorian, and alone in the world on a calendar of its own devising that nobody else could read.

In 1711 King Charles XII gave up and ordered a retreat back to the Julian calendar. To do that, Sweden had to put back the day it had removed in 1700. But 1712 was already a leap year, so it already had a 29 February.

So Sweden added another one.

30 February 1712. It was a Friday. The year had 367 days. It is the only 30 February in recorded history, and real people used it — a couple named Sven Hall and Ellna Jeppsdotter were married in Ystad on that date, and spent the rest of their lives unable to celebrate their anniversary on the day it happened.

Sweden finally went Gregorian in 1753, jumping from 17 February straight to 1 March. It had taken fifty-three years, a war, one impossible date and four monarchs.

Stockholm sits at 59.3° north, which gives it one of the widest daylight swings of any capital on this list. Around midsummer the city gets roughly eighteen and a half hours of daylight. Around the winter solstice it gets about six.

There is something fitting about the country that could not agree what day it was being located where the day itself varies by twelve hours. In Stockholm, the question "how long is a day?" has never had a stable answer, and for a while in the early 1700s, neither did "what is the date?"