Vaexjoe, a town in Sweden, is looking to be the greenest city in the EU. They’re doing quite well already. It’s great to see that cities are protecting the environment as best they can with such enthusiasm.

While the European Union (EU) aims to raise its share of renewable energy consumption to 20 percent by 2020, Vaexjoe, a town of 80,000 people nestled between lakes and forests in Sweden’s south, can boast of already exceeding 50 percent — and 90 percent when it comes to heating.

Carbon dioxide emissions per inhabitant dropped by 30 percent between 1993 and 2006.

“It’s a lot but we’re not satisfied, we want to reduce them further,” says Henrik Johansson, an environmental expert at city hall.

In fact, Vaexjoe, which in 1996 set the ambitious goal of ultimately reducing its consumption of fossil fuels to zero, wants to halve its CO2 emissions by 2010 and reduce them by 70 percent by 2050.

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