Oh yeah, a 12 hour drive from Copenhagen! And the largest port in the world? Wait what?
I definitely did not take that picture, but thought it was really beautiful, so had to share it ahah. Anyway, this past week we went on our Long Study Tours. They are sort of trips integrated with academically relevant visits, so for our class we focused on sustainability issues!
Our first visit was to Except Netherlands, which is a kind of consulting business that works with companies to develop long term sustainable practices. They started off as an architectural design firm, and now work with 20 different disciplines (engineering, chemistry, etc) to look at sustainability problems from every angle! Their main this is that by fixing just one problem from one viewpoint, then just you create another externality (such as LED light bulbs, less energy and that's great, but the high mercury content makes them extremely difficult to dispose of). So, their solution is to have large groups of people with different background working together! Their plans are very elaborate and ambitious, but pretty brilliant and definitely innovative.
They've done several really cool projects in the past few years. They won a design competition to reconstruct the San Francisco Transbay Terminal. They basically came up with this comprehensive plan to incorporate "Green Space" (parks, trees, flowers, which are proven to increase productivity and contentment in city-goers) into the terminal! There would be an extremely deep soil layer which would help cycle air from the underground, and would help filter water. It was just a really neat idea. Obviously, they are not using all the ideas and have to hire other architects and may not be able to stick to the plan 100%, but the project should be finished by 2015! I just think it's really neat to see. Here's the website for the complete plan:
They also redesigned this water-pumping station for a little town in Australia. They came up with this huge, overwhelming plan that the town first rejected because it was too ambitious, but then cam back! The system used the extensive underground water system to grow some specific kind of algea (spirulina I'm pretty sure) which has a very high market proce, easy to grow, and would create jobs in the area, which was basically a dying town. The algae also is one of the only natural source of B12, so I probably should know what it is, but oh well haha... But it was just really interesting! And, again, it's something that looks great in the planning stage and then is used. It gets so frustrating hearing about these lofty goals people have and then wait, everything falls through. So, it's not perfect and is crazy expensive, but at least this group seems to have really great ideas and the resources to put them into practice.
Another interesting aspect is that they are non-profit, but run as a nonprofit, which basically means that they take other factors into account besides how much money they make, such as CSR (corporate social responsibility), so they are ethically not profit driven. The point was that they would turn down high-paying customers if they don't believe they have similar beliefs, such as the American water bottle industry that asked them to put together an awareness campaign on water issues, which is great and important, but it would then be used as an advertising tool for the company. But, bottled water is basically a scam (seriously, watch Tapped, worth your time, I promise), so they turned it down! The woman giving the presentation was the co-owner, so obviously a lot of these projects and ideas are idealize, but I love that there is someone doing this. Lets look at a problem and work together to figure out integrated solutions! So cool. Here's their website if anyone's interested:
Rotterdam is a really interesting city though. We only spent 2 days there, but I think that was a plenty time ahah.
We found this street with handprints of all these different people just on the street! But interesting!
We never decided if these were legitimate or not ahah... This one lead us to believe not so much.
Hello, is it me you're looking for?
'Cause I wonder where you are...
But, yeah! It was an interesting city and I never would have gone on my own, so I'm glad we went! Our other visit was to a municipality and was basically a bust. The person who gave the presentation clearly was just handed the job when she didn't really know what was going on, and just read off a piece of paper. That was the problem with a few of the visits... They sounded interesting, but I don't think we got much out of a lot of the visits haha. But! Still a very good trip and I will write about Amsterdam soon (I promise this time haha). Happy Saturday!
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