The country that makes sustainability feel like the path of least resistance
Sweden is the rare place where doing the right thing environmentally tends to also be the easier, cheaper, more pleasant option. Trains run on time and on renewable electricity. Tap water is drinkable everywhere — often better than the bottled stuff. Cycling infrastructure is treated as transport, not novelty. And the Swedish concept of allemansrätten, the right of public access, means the forests, lakes and archipelagos belong to everyone willing to treat them with respect. For a traveller looking to lower their footprint without spending the trip white-knuckling a spreadsheet, few countries make it this effortless.
Getting in (and around) without the long-haul guilt
If you're coming from elsewhere in Europe, the train is genuinely competitive. Direct and connecting services link Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö with Copenhagen, Hamburg and Berlin, and the night-train scene to and from Sweden has had a meaningful revival in recent years. Crossing the Øresund Bridge from Copenhagen to Malmö is one of the most painless international transfers anywhere — you can be sitting in a Malmö café within half an hour of leaving Denmark.
Inside the country, SJ, the state rail operator, runs intercity services that are reliable, comfortable and powered largely by renewable electricity. The high-speed line between Stockholm and Gothenburg gets you between Sweden's two biggest cities in around three hours. Going further north — to Östersund, Umeå, Luleå, Kiruna and Abisko — is one of the most underrated rail journeys in Europe. The night train to Lapland is a destination in itself.
For shorter hops, regional buses and ferries fill the gaps. Domestic flying exists, but unless you're heading deep into the Arctic or to Gotland in a hurry, you rarely need it.
Stockholm: a capital built on water and good design
Stockholm's geography does half the sustainability work for it. The city is spread across fourteen islands, which means walking, cycling and ferries are often faster than driving. The metro — Tunnelbana — runs on renewable electricity and is famous for its art-installation stations, so even your commute is a museum visit.
A few low-impact ways to spend a few days:
- Djurgården: a green island within the city, home to the Vasa Museum, Skansen open-air museum and miles of walking paths. Reachable by ferry or on foot.
- Gamla Stan: the medieval old town, best explored on foot. Skip the tourist-trap restaurants on the main square; the side streets do better food at saner prices.
- Södermalm: the island where Stockholm's secondhand and vintage scene lives. Look for the cluster of charity and consignment shops around Hornstull and along Götgatan.
- Archipelago day trips: public ferries operated by Waxholmsbolaget run out to islands like Vaxholm, Grinda and Sandhamn. A scheduled ferry beats a chartered boat on every metric that matters.
What to look for in a hotel here: a property powered by renewable electricity, with credible third-party environmental certification (Nordic Swan Ecolabel, Green Key or similar), serious food-waste policies in the kitchen, and refillable amenities rather than single-use miniatures. Stockholm has plenty of options that tick all four — you don't have to compromise on comfort to find them.
Gothenburg: the quietly ambitious west coast
Gothenburg has spent years near the top of various global rankings of sustainable destinations, and it shows in the way the city actually functions rather than in any tourist-board slogan. Trams cover most of the centre. The harbour, once heavily industrial, has been progressively cleaned up. And the food scene leans hard into West Coast seafood with strong traceability — a lot of restaurants will tell you which boat your fish came in on.
For travellers, the city is also the gateway to the Bohuslän coast, a stretch of pink-granite islands and fishing villages that you can explore by a combination of regional bus, local ferry and your own two legs. Smögen, Marstrand and the Koster Islands — Sweden's only marine national park — are all reachable without a car.
Malmö and Skåne: cycling country
Malmö is one of the easiest cities in Europe to navigate by bike. The whole region of Skåne is flat, the cycle network is properly mapped and signposted, and you can string together multi-day routes through farmland, beech forests and along the coast. The Sydkustleden follows the southern coast; the Kattegattleden runs up the west coast all the way to Gothenburg and is one of the most highly regarded cycle tourism routes in the Nordics.
What makes Skåne work for low-impact travel isn't just the cycling — it's that the region's railway network slots into it. You can put a bike on a regional train, ride for a day, and train back. No car required, no logistical gymnastics.
The far north: how to do Lapland responsibly
The Arctic is having a moment, and it's worth being honest about what that means. Northern lights tourism, husky sledding and ice-hotel experiences are wonderful, but they exist inside fragile ecosystems and on land that is also home to the Sámi, Sweden's Indigenous people. A few principles to travel by:
- Take the night train from Stockholm to Abisko, Kiruna or Narvik instead of flying. It's cheaper, more comfortable than you'd expect, and saves a substantial amount of carbon.
- Choose Sámi-owned operators for reindeer experiences, cultural tours and food. The cultural authenticity is real and the money stays in the community.
- Mind the wildlife. Northern lights chasing in convoys of off-road vehicles is bad for tundra and bad for animals. Smaller groups, slower pace.
- Respect the leave-no-trace ethic. Allemansrätten gives you the right to roam, camp and forage, but it comes with the implicit duty to leave the land exactly as you found it.
Abisko National Park is one of the best places on earth to see the aurora because of a microclimate that keeps its skies unusually clear. You can reach it by train and base yourself at the park entrance — no flight, no shuttle, no hire car.
Eating well, eating local
Sweden's food culture has quietly become one of the more interesting in Europe, and a lot of that is built on seasonality. Summer is berries, new potatoes, dill, crayfish and West Coast shellfish. Autumn is mushrooms, game and root vegetables. Winter leans into preserved fish, fermented dairy and slow-cooked everything.
A few things worth knowing:
- Tap water is excellent. Refusing bottled water in restaurants is normal, not rude.
- Vegan and vegetarian options are everywhere. Plant-based eating is mainstream in Sweden in a way it still isn't in much of southern Europe.
- Fika is a real thing. The mid-afternoon coffee-and-pastry ritual is a low-impact pleasure: sit down, slow down, eat a cinnamon bun, watch the world pass.
- Look for KRAV certification — Sweden's organic standard — on menus and in supermarkets if that matters to you.
Outdoors without leaving a mark
Allemansrätten is Sweden's quiet superpower. It lets you walk across most uncultivated land, swim in any lake, pitch a tent for a night more or less anywhere reasonable, and forage for berries and mushrooms. The flip side is that the system only works because Swedes take its obligations seriously: don't disturb, don't destroy, don't dump.
If you've never tried it, a few good entry points:
- Kungsleden (the King's Trail) in Lapland — the classic long-distance hike, with mountain huts run by the Swedish Tourist Association.
- Skåneleden in the south — a network of trails through farmland, forest and coast, easy to access by train.
- Sörmlandsleden — over a thousand kilometres of waymarked trail starting basically on Stockholm's doorstep.
- Sea kayaking in the Stockholm or Gothenburg archipelagos — most operators rent by the day and provide briefings on no-trace island camping.
What to bring home (and what not to)
Sweden's design tradition — clean lines, durable materials, things made to be repaired rather than replaced — is itself a kind of sustainability. If you're shopping, look for small-batch ceramics, secondhand Scandinavian glass, vintage textiles, and brands working with recycled wool or organic linen. Avoid mass-produced "Sweden" souvenirs that were almost certainly made on the other side of the world.
Stockholm and Gothenburg both have thriving secondhand scenes. Charity-shop chains like Myrorna and Stadsmissionen have branches in most cities and are excellent places to find decent clothing for the rest of your trip if you've packed wrong for the weather, which you will have.
Booking it, paying for it, offsetting it
Sweden makes it unusually easy to plan a trip where the trains, the food, the hotels and the activities all line up with how you'd like to travel. When you book your stay through IMPT, every hotel night offsets a tonne of CO₂ on-chain, paid from our side rather than added to your bill — useful on a trip where you've already done a lot of the heavy lifting yourself by choosing rail over air. The IMPT shop is a reasonable place to look for travel kit from brands that take materials seriously, and the IMPT Card and Token sit quietly in the background, rewarding the climate-conscious choices you were going to make anyway. Sweden does most of the work. We just make sure the trip leaves the planet a little better than it found it.