Portugal’s Minister of Environment and Energy, Maria da Graça Carvalho, will lead a delegation to Denmark on 5 and 6 October to study how the Danes collect, sort and burn their rubbish. She will travel with the Secretary of State for the Environment, João Manuel Esteves, the president of the Portuguese Environment Agency (APA), José Pimenta Machado, mayors from the Algarve and representatives of the sector. The technical visit is organised by AMAL, the Algarve’s intermunicipal community, with the H2O & Sustainability Innovation Hub, and includes a stop at ARC’s Amager Bakke plant in Copenhagen. AMAL, which announced the trip on 30 September, says the aim is to understand the technology, operating models and the way Danish municipalities, industry, operators and public bodies work together.
A region with eighteen months of landfill left
The urgency is local. The Algarve produces about 400,000 tonnes of waste a year and sends 85% of it to landfill, against a national average of 56% and an EU ceiling of 10% by 2035, the minister said in Faro in August; the share was 80% not long ago, and the region’s waste grew 13% in four years as population and tourism rose. Its two landfills, at Loulé and Portimão, had between a year and a half and two years of space left at the time; a new cell at each is planned to stretch capacity to about seven years. “The capacity of the Algarve’s landfills is reaching its limit, creating challenges for the whole region and every sector of activity,” AMAL president António Pina said this week, calling the Danish system “an international model of reference and good practice”.
Lisbon’s answer is taking shape. In early September the Council of Ministers approved Terra +, a national waste strategy that aims to cut landfill to 10% by 2035 with €2.3 billion of investment, €1.6 billion of it public money between 2026 and 2030, and rules out new landfills. It keeps energy recovery on the table for regions where the situation is most acute, and APA is due to launch on 15 October a study to identify “the best technology for the Algarve and the best location” for a plant meant to take the region’s residual waste from 2035. The idea is contested: the environmental group Zero argued last year that incineration would raise waste bills and divert money from recycling.
What Copenhagen will show them
Amager Bakke is the obvious exhibit. Opened on 30 March 2017 at a reported cost of about $670 million, the plant was designed to burn roughly 400,000 tonnes of municipal waste a year — almost exactly the Algarve’s annual output. It can swing between 0 and 63 MW of electricity and 157 to 247 MW of district heating depending on demand and power prices, and its roof, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, carries an artificial ski slope and a climbing wall; it was named World Building of the Year in 2021. Most of its output is heat for Copenhagen’s district-heating network, the part of the model least likely to travel to the mild Algarve.
The delegation will also find a country that is shrinking the system it came to see. In June 2020 Denmark adopted a climate plan for the waste sector that cuts approved incineration capacity by about 30% by 2030, from 3.95 million to 2.77 million tonnes, to match expected Danish residual waste and limit imports of foreign rubbish, and aims to keep 80% of plastic waste out of incinerators by the same date. ARC itself was found ineligible for national carbon-capture funding in 2022. The Danish lesson, in other words, is as much about sorting and recycling first, and sizing furnaces to what is left, as about the furnaces themselves.
Why this matters for the corridor
Denmark’s waste-to-energy plants, district-heating systems and the consultancies and suppliers that built them are an export industry, and the Algarve is now at the start of a procurement path: a technology-and-site study tendered from mid-October, then design, permitting and construction of a facility intended to run from 2035, with EU funding in view. A ministerial visit does not decide any of that. But putting the minister, the head of the agency running the study and the mayors who must win local consent in front of a Danish plant ten days before the study is tendered signals which model Portugal is measuring itself against — and which suppliers will be watching the tender.
Sources: AMAL statement of 30 September 2026 as reported by Mais Algarve, Jornal PT Green and Sul Informação; Lusa/Forbes Portugal (9 August 2026) on the minister’s Faro announcement; Postal do Algarve/Lusa (4 September 2026) on the Terra + strategy; Barlavento (27 May 2026) on landfill capacity; Postal do Algarve/Lusa (8 March 2025) for Zero’s position; State of Green and Ea Energianalyse on Denmark’s 2020 waste-sector climate plan; published technical data on Amager Bakke.