The trial against eleven people connected with Swedish waste company Think Pink started Tuesday in Stockholm. The company has been charged with illegally dumping at least 200,000 metric tons of waste from the Stockholm area in 21 places across 15 municipalities in Sweden. In reality, the number of illegal waste sites was much larger—so large that the court had to limit the charges for time reasons.
Managing director of the now-defunct company was self-proclaimed “Queen of Trash” Bella Nilsson, a former stripper currently going by the name Fariba Vancor, having changed her first name nine times and last name seven. Born in Iran as Isabella Khatibi Ghabagh Tabeh, she ran the refuse company together with her then-husband Thomas Nilsson, also charged in the case.
Vancor claims innocence and says she’s the victim of ploys from competitors. In the company’s heyday, she was celebrated in the media as a brave woman entrepreneur breaking into a largely male market. Her company was twice given a prestigious business award and its signature hot pink trash bags were a common sight in communities surrounding Stockholm.
Think Pink was contracted by municipalities and businesses to sort and properly dispose of building and demolition waste—including electronics, building materials, and auto tires. Instead, the company dumped the refuse and buried hazardous materials—sometimes on private land— with “no intention or ability to handle it in line with environmental legislation,” the charges say. As a result, toxic substances such as arsenic, mercury, dioxins, PCBs, and lead leaked into the soil, air, and water.
Toxic waste was improperly disposed of in the vicinity of water protection areas, unprotected stormwater wells, homes, and protected coastal areas. Some of the waste sites also caught fire and burned for months.
Whether the company ever intended to do what it had promised is unclear.
“In the beginning, there may have been an intention to run a completely legal business, but from 2015 onward, as we’ve examined, there was no such intention,” said Anders Gustafsson, one of the prosecutors in the case.
Chief prosecutor Linda Schön raised questions about whether anyone had scrutinized Think Pink’s capability to recycle the waste and the unusually low service charges. Government procurement rules in Sweden generally obligate agencies to accept the lowest bidder for services, with some exceptions.
Carina Molin, the head of community planning in Botkyrka, one of the worst affected municipalities, was present on the first day of the trial. “This is about systematic organized crime,” she told daily Dagens Samhälle.
The indictment against eleven members of the Think Pink gang marks one of Sweden’s largest environmental crime cases. The preliminary investigation, which has been going on for over ten years, spans approximately 50,000 pages. Of the defendants, five are accused of serious environmental crimes, four of whom also face charges related to financial crimes. One individual is charged with aiding and abetting serious environmental crime, while the remaining five are suspected of lesser environmental offenses.
Prosecutors say there are claims for damages of about €23 million, largely from municipalities forced to clean up the dump sites. The trial is expected to go on until May or June 2025. If convicted, the former managing director of Think Pink could face up to six years in prison. Nilsson/Vancor’s defense lawyer, Jan Tibbing, is a former prosecutor with the economic crime division whose identification badge was found in Nilsson’s underwear drawer during a search of her house last year, shortly after he left the prosecutor’s office.
