February 18, 2013

How to build bigger floodplains

Filed under: Nature,Sustainability by Branko Collin @ 1:08 pm

‘Room for the River’ is a Dutch state project that intends to widen the floodplains of the major rivers.

The project does something that is quite rare for the Dutch, it gives land back to the water. In 1993 and 1995 we had major river floods, the latter even leading to the evacuation of 250,000 people. Geographically, the Netherlands is a river delta, and the Dutch have always had to live with river floods. However, today the population pressure has made the consequences of floods much more expensive.

As the project website says: “The rivers are wedged between increasingly higher dikes behind which more and more people live. At the same time, the land behind the dikes has sunk. It is also raining more often and harder, causing rivers to swell. Water levels are rising and so is the chance of floods with a large impact on people, animals, infrastructure and the economy.”

The New York Times has visited one of those projects and uses it for an opinion piece on how big government is good.

Short read: The Ruimte voor de Rivier site has Nine easy infographics on how to give the river room.

(Photo: Waal beach by Rijkswaterstaat / Ruimte voor de Rivier / Martin van Lokven)

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February 5, 2013

Lab-grown meat a success, cooking it up is on hold

Filed under: Food & Drink,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 2:04 pm

A year ago we told you about a lab in Maastricht that was growing synthetic meat, which was really expensive to make and should have been ready to grill in the fall of 2012.

The long-awaited lab-grown meat is now a reality, but researcher Mark Post wants to have at least two pieces of meat before he does any grilling, which again could take many more months. The goal is to have the two pieces of meat prepared by English chef Heston Blumenthal, owner of the three-Michelin-starred restaurant The Fat Duck in the UK who is very much into molecular-level cooking.

(Link: opmerkelijk.nieuws.nl)

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November 27, 2012

Hop on an electric scooter during the week instead of a taxi

Filed under: Automobiles,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 11:09 am

According to our sources, Amsterdam has just launched an electric scooter taxi service called Hopper, although Hopper’s press release mentioned as of October 1. “For a fixed rate of EUR 2.50 a ride, as long as the final destination is within city limits. The project is a private-public cooperation with the City of Amsterdam, Dutch Railways (NS) and the Ministry of Infrastructure & Environment and helps solve metropolitan transportation problems.”

Hopper apparently took five years of planning, is only available downtown, the Zuidas business district and the RAI exhibition hall area, and runs on weekdays from 8 am to 8 pm. You can order a Hopper by phone or a smartphone but not yet (they don’t say iPhone or Android). The goal is to expand to Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht, aka the Randstad conurbation.

Although A+ for effort, the part I have to chip away at is when they state that, “scooters in Amsterdam are limited to a top speed of 25 km/h, which means customers (and their drivers, for that matter) can ride without helmets.” Yes, the helmet bit is true, but the last thing cyclists in Amsterdam need right now is more scooter traffic on bike paths. This year Amsterdam’s parking enforcement officers set the worst possible example by doing dangerous things such as driving over the limit and against cycling traffic. The amount of scooters that go over 25 km/h on bike paths is surely more than half. I’m not saying Hoppers drive too fast, but I’m not convinced they won’t try.

I would consider making use of this service, although in the weekend and surely after 8 pm, but that’s just me. If anyone out there has actually used or even seen one of these, let us know. It’s all nice and green to have electric vehicles on the streets of Amsterdam, but like any other means of transportation they also cause their own set of problems. It would be great to be able to pay so little to get around town regularly, as taxis start at EUR 7,50.

(Link: green.autoblog.com, Photo by Facemepls, some rights reserved)

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November 19, 2012

Dutch Prius drivers use too much petrol

Filed under: Automobiles,Sustainability,Technology by Branko Collin @ 11:25 pm

A study by broadcaster NOS shows that owners of plug-in hybrid eletric cars use “80 percent more fuel than the fuel economy estimates found in the manufacturers’ specifications”, Autoblog writes.

The article suggests that car owners buy their Priuses for the government rebates more than for saving the environment. Government incentives include “no purchase tax, zero percent additional tax liability and no road tax until 2016” according to the article. Car owners can request charging stations near their house according to Verkeersnet. The city of Utrecht even throws in a free parking spot.

On average the drivers in the study paid 73 euro more per month than expected by using petrol when they could be using electricity.

Some of the people in the study managed to only achieve a petrol use of 13 kilometres per litre, others got to a far more respectable 250 kilometres per litre.

(Photo by DaveOnFlickr, some rights reserved)

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September 13, 2012

Dutch to produce world’s first almost 100% recyclable asphalt

Filed under: Dutch first,Sustainability,Technology by Orangemaster @ 5:00 am

Dutch company VolkerWessels has just unveiled a Dutch invention called the HERA System (Highly Ecological Recycling Asphalt System), which is said to recycle asphalt “cleaner, better and cheaper”. The first HERA in the world was recently installed at the Rotterdam Asphalt Plant.

Asphalt is normally produced and recycled by directly heating raw materials. The HERA System reuses almost 100% of old asphalt, has much lower harmful gas emissions and saves on costs. As well, the asphalt produced is of high quality and last longer.

The HERA System was developed together with Swiss company Ammann, a major player in asphalt production facilities.

Watch the corporate Dutch video with drummers and cooking meat comparisons.

(Link: www.agentschapnl.nl, Photo VolkerWessels)

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June 22, 2012

Kite Power demo by former astronaut Wubbo Ockels

Filed under: Science,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 11:34 am

Back in 2008 a concert raised money to develop the laddermill, a sustainable invention by former astronaut Wubbo Ockels (shown here), and today Ockel’s Kite Power research group from the Delft University of Technology will be showcasing a wind energy system using kites at the Maasvlakte 2 shore in South Holland.

The Kite Power Team explains that Kite Power is a type of wind energy where a radiographically controlled kite generates electricity. A single cable attached to the kite is pulled and released from the base station every two minutes, spinning a drum that in turn powers a generator. Pulling the kite takes energy, but less than it is generated. The kite can fly up to 900 metres and be used to generate electricity fully automatically, which is its major asset.

(Link: home.tudelft.nl, Photo of Wubbo Ockels courtesy of Emmanuelle)

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May 13, 2012

Dutch Repair Cafes take sustainability to your neighbourhood

Filed under: Design,Sustainability by Branko Collin @ 5:09 pm

The New York Times has a story about Dutch ‘repair cafes’:

At Amsterdam’s first Repair Cafe, an event originally held in a theater’s foyer, then in a rented room in a former hotel and now in a community center a couple of times a month, people can bring in whatever they want to have repaired, at no cost, by volunteers who just like to fix things.

Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations, all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus.

According to the article there are currently thirty repair cafés spread around the country (several cities have more than one of them) . The idea was conceived by journalist Martine Postma in 2009, and implemented for the first time in October of that same year in Amsterdam West.

I totally dig this idea, as I always have broken stuff lying around that is cheaper to replace than to repair, which bugs me no end.

What’s more, sometimes you have devices that are impossible to replace. There is currently, for instance, no substitution on the market for my Canon Powershot A620 digital photo camera (2005), at least no substitution that combines all the useful features of that little device (see note below). If I brought it to a commercial repair shop, they would charge me just 50 euro to look inside. I have tried taking it apart myself, but being completely inept when it comes to electronics, I had to stop when the chance became real that I would accidentally touch the flash unit’s capacitor and shock myself.

(Note: before you mention it, I am aware that the Canon Powershot G12 and the Nikon P7100 come close, but both are considerably larger, taking them to the extreme of what can still be considered pocketable. The Canon Powershot S100 on the other hand lacks a viewfinder.)

(Link: Repair Café)

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March 28, 2012

Solar panels on concert hall roof for that green effect

Filed under: Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 9:28 pm

While the Amsterdam Municipal Theatre has bees on its roof, Amsterdam concert hall Muziektheater now boasts the largest solar panel installation on one single roof in Amsterdam and in the Netherlands. Some 350 solar panels cover approximately 1,000 square metres of the building’s roof and will generate as much electricity as would normally be used by 30 Amsterdam households. The solar panels generate 85,000 kWh of power a year, reducing CO2 emissions by 52 tons a year.

(Link: www.amsterdam.nl, Photo of Muziektheater by Alberto Alvarez-Perea, some rights reserved)

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March 21, 2012

It’s the year of the bee, more bees please

Filed under: Food & Drink,Nature,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 12:07 pm

A few days ago, beekeepers placed some 20,000 bees on the roof of the Amsterdam Municipal Theatre smack downtown in a serious attempt to help increase the honey bee population and eventually make honey. There are enough green spaces and trees in Amsterdam to hopefully start making honey this summer according to an optimistic beekeeper. And if you thought keeping bees on the roof of a theatre is weird, it’s been all the rage for years on the roof of the Paris Opera, in New York and other European cities.

Bees have been disappearing for years in Amsterdam, and so this is just another attempt at keeping them buzzing around. We apparently need bees for food growth and could use a boost of the wild bee population.

Bees can’t hurt you unless you mess with them, then they will sting you and die. I might be allergic to a proper bee sting so I go around them like the bully in the school yard at recess. I love watching them work, and who doesn’t like a good waggle dance?

(Link: nl.odemagazine.com, Photo of Honey bee by TexasEagle, some rights reserved.)

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February 8, 2012

Parking enforcement officers set the worst possible example

Filed under: Automobiles,Bicycles,General,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 12:41 pm

Parking enforcement officers in Amsterdam, and surely in other cities, cause nuisance to cyclists and pedestrians on their scooters. They drive side by side, sometimes against cycling traffic, and faster than the allowed 25 km/h. They have no reason or right to do any of this, either. Let me remind you that scooters and mopeds cause 10 to 20 percent of all accidents in the Netherlands.

And that’s not all. According to Nieuws uit Amsterdam, they don’t wear helmets and drive a polluting type of scooter, while the city pushes for traffic safety and clean air. You can imagine why cyclists union Fietsersbond highly recommends these parking enforcement officers do their jobs on a bicycle just like a whole bunch of other working people do.

Ever since the cold spell started well over a week ago, the beloved ticket givers have traded in their scooters for taxis. That’s right: the city is paying for them to be driven around town with taxpayers’ money by taxi. In Canada they’d just walk around wearing warm clothes, but oh no, snow is dangerous here! Why don’t they just have cars?

True, scootering around on icy streets is dangerous, and cycling is also not a good idea, but what’s wrong with walking? It’s like nobody thought of it. Tons of people work outdoors day in day out despite the cold, why are these people so special? Before ‘do you it yourself and see how cold it is’ pops up in the comments, I was a bike courier in Montréal, Canada for three years also during the winter with temps of -25 celsius. Dress warmly and keep moving.

(Link: www.nieuwsuitamsterdam.nl)

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