The city of Eskilstuna in Sweden was once a steel-producing powerhouse, but as the industry declined rapidly throughout the 1970s, so did the town. It now has an unemployment rate that is almost double the national average of 8%. But the town has come up with an answer: recycling!

Far from the Scandinavian stereotype of glossy modernity, Eskilstuna’s wide-paved, near-deserted grey streets are populated by kitsch 1980s pizzerias, workers’ cafes and gloomy pubs – not a place where you would expect to find such a radical approach to the environment. Yet since 2012, Eskilstuna has implemented a spate of green initiatives, vying to make it the most environmentally friendly city in Sweden – and perhaps the world. Public buses and cars are run on biogas and electricity, and the town uses low-carbon combined heat and power plants, which use thermal energy from electricity production to heat water.

Residents sort their waste into seven multicolored categories at home – green for food, pink for textiles, grey for metal, yellow for paper, blue for newspaper, orange for plastic and black for mixed – and for the past four years people have been able to drop off their unwanted goods for recycling at fashion designer Anna Bergström’s secondhand mall.

With continued high unemployment, these environmental policies could appear nothing more than a cynical rebrand for a town that “nobody wanted to come to”. Yet while the new recycling scheme has created 50 new jobs—a small dent in the almost 15,000 unemployed—for resident, the radical green action has not just put Eskilstuna back on the map. It has done so in a way that makes them proud.