Deutsche Bahn
When I go to my university I always take the train. And although this might sound green I don’t know where the electricity for the trains comes from. Bahn.de leads me to the DB Eco Program. Although it a nice site, I still have trouble finding information about what type of electricity is used for train travel. Is it plain old coal, or maybe wind, solar, hydro or even geothermal? The only thing I can find is the Environmental Mobility Check which shows the difference in CO₂ emissions between car and train travel.

Through Google I finally find that DB now uses wind energy from 33 wind turbines. The nice thing is that DB gets this wind energy from the Bremen utility company SWB. Next to wind power I also find that from 2014 onwards DB will start using hydropower. They also save energy by enhancing locomotives to convert braking energy into electricity (shouldn’t that have been implemented from day one onwards?). And, last but not least, just like car drivers, DB teaches their locomotive drivers to drive in an energy efficient way.

Related to trains is my time spend at Bremen Hauptbahnhof. When there is a train delay I always look at the English magazine section of a book store. Last week I bought Time Magazine and I was surprised to read a variety of articles about ‘How to Fix Capitalism’. This week I saw that the Harvard Business Review had an article called Runaway Capitalism and another one called The Economics of Well-Being about GDP alternatives, talking about measuring a ‘happiness index’. This amazes and surprises me. Am I a ‘new kid on the block’ here? And are these type of subjects since long common practice, or is there real change in the air? Can you smell it?

Bicycling
I bought myself a new bicycle, or to be honest, me and my girlfriend bought myself a new bicycle. I know, I should have had a bicycle from day one in Bremen of course. I am Dutch you know. But sometimes laziness wins, as was the case here. Bremen is really bicycle friendly. The City of Bremen website provides a nice map with all the bicycle lanes in Bremen.

Me and my girlfriend went out bicycling together a couple of weeks ago, although it was quite cold. We went to Blockland, which is really beautiful! You bicycle on a cute little dike which curves gently following the little Wümme river. The houses along the dike are also very cute and now and then you smell the – for me very familiar – scent of a farm. There are also restaurants, like Wümmeblick. This restaurant however is on the opposite dike which is already the German state Niedersachsen. Bremen State is really small indeed!

One moment while we bicycled there was a taxi driving past called Bremen Clean Air Taxi. I guess Bremen is truly a greenish city and green is so hip here that this taxi company thinks it is profitable to act green. Blockland is close to the University of Bremen and this configuration reminds me of my old hometown Utrecht. There you have the river Kromme Rijn close to Utrecht University. This river also has many bends just like the Wümme river in Blockland.

Coffee and beer
I make a cappuccino almost every day ever since I went to Malawi to help start a coffee bar back in 2010. The coffee bar idea never worked out, and the required revenue is now created by renting out rooms. The house in the Malawian capital Lilongwe as far as I know still has the big espresso machine. Later, in 2011 when I was visiting a friend in Berlin I learned a much simpler way to make a cappuccino. When I was in Rome a couple of weeks later I bought myself such a little cappuccino making set. It includes a little espresso maker for on the stove and a milk can with a filter to stir up the milk after it has boiled. I know, you will probably say: duh! I started out with drinking Lavazza coffee but since I live in Bremen I am trying out different fair trade types of coffee:

• Utamtsi coffee from Cameroon.
• Espresso from GEPA.
• MAYA Kaffee from Mexico which I bought in ALECO.
• La cortadora from El Salvador

So far I like the MAYA Kaffee best. But there are a lot of eco/reform shops around in Bremen so I will definitely stumble upon other coffees. Next to the in my previous post mentioned shops I also found for example this Bremen shop: Bio Leutner.

I talked about coffee a lot now already (as it is quite important for me) but there is more then just coffee. So what about beer? I found so far two green beers: Pinkus Bio Bier and Nordsch (Bremer Bio Bier). I haven’t tasted them so far but that is on my to do list.

Flying
According to the book Natural Capitalism on p126:

Much if not most air travel would cost less, use less fuel, produce less total noise, and be about twice as fast point-to-point by using much smaller and more numerous planes that go directly from a departure city to a destination.

I’ve been flying quite a lot the last couple of years. In January I flew for the first time via Bremen. It was a flight to Vienna, but I had a transit in Munich. The flight from Munich to Vienna was just going up and going down, it only took around 45 minutes. Both planes were completely full though. But I’m wondering, could this all be done more efficient? In a week I’m flying from Bremen to Rome, again via Munich. The only thing about Munich Airport I find mentionable so far is the fact that I found out that also half liter plastic coca cola bottles have pfand! Bremen Airport seems to be more interesting. My girlfriend made the following picture there:

The quote above about air traffic is from the Natural Capitalism chapter ‘Muda, Service and Flow’. The term Muda is Japanese for ‘waste’, ‘futility’ or ‘purposelessness’. I find this word and how it is described very powerful. When properly trained a person starts to see Muda everywhere. This and various ways and examples how to get rid of Muda as an engineer is described in the book Lean Thinking. It seems that not only people are getting overweight but also our industry and companies! We really need to rethink our industrial civilization and put it on a diet.

I currently live in Bremen, Germany and I’m positively surprised to see that there are, compared to the Netherlands, quite a lot of green supermarkets here. The following two are chains and can be found in more then one location:

• ALECO which is only here in Bremen and surrounding area.
• Alnatura which has 65 stores all over Germany.

Not that I shop there every day. To be honest, I am quite used to the everyday stuff I can find in ‘normal’ supermarkets. But I will definitely put on my exploring hat and will check out the contents of these shops. So am I living green? I guess not. How far are we anyway from the green ideas described in books like:

• Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken
• Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins
• Ecological Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Because the word green is rather vague I would like to delve more deeply into what green and living green actually means. I hope to post regularly about this subject.

Dealing with trash and waste
Comparing to what I’ve seen in the Netherlands one thing which is done better here in Bremen is the separation and collecting of trash. People separate their trash at home and Deutche Bahn even has special trash bins with four separate entries for Glass, Packaging, Paper and Waste.

The local government provides special yellow plastic bags in which plastics, metals and things like milk containers are collected. The bag itself is made from PEHD which according to this website can be recycled into “pipes, buckets and bins, pens, flower pots, film and sheets, benches, and even dog houses”. Left you can see the label printed on the yellow plastic bag.

The bags are from the company Nehlsen. This is a company founded in Bremen involved in a variety of important services such as Beach Cleaning, Recycling and Waste Collection and Street Cleaning. According to their website it operates in 60 locations in Germany and has international branches in Eastern Europe and Africa. The most recent branch was established in Ghana in 2011.

In the Netherlands I’m used to bringing empty glass bottles back to the shop and get some money back. There it is called ‘Statiegeld’ and in Germany they use the word ‘Pfand’. What amazes me is that not only glass jars are recycled this way but also cans. A Coca Cola can for example had the Pfand logo. The importance of this was made clear after reading page 49 and 50 of Natural Capitalism. Here you can read what it takes to make a cola can, from mining the aluminum to shipping the unfinished product from country to country. The book continues:

Every product we consume has a similar hidden history, an unwritten inventory of its materials, resources, and impacts. It also has attendant waste generated by its use and disposition. In Germany, this hidden history is called “ecological rucksack.”

The recycling of trash however is only part of the answer. A full 100% recycling of all our stuff would be amazing but in the meantime business as usual continues. This means that we also need to look at using stuff more efficiently. Trying to use less of it. Just go into a supermarket and see how much stuff is there. And then to think there are hundreds of supermarkets in Germany alone. How many supermarkets are there in the world anyway? All these different products with their nice attractive colors. Marketeers are mimicking nature, like flowers attracting insects with bright colors. But should we not also mimic nature by creating biodegradable waste?

Calculating my ecological footprint
The ecological rucksack (backpack) is an important concept if you want to calculate your ecological footprint. The ecological rucksack of my newly bought laptop for example is almost 4000 times its weight according to Natural Capitalism. And this WWF video even states that Amazon forest was destroyed to create a laptop. Darn!

So how can I calculate my footprint? Well, so far I found the following links:

• Ecological Footprint Quiz from the Center for Sustainable Economy.
• Ecological Footprint Quiz from the Global Footprint Network
• Footprint Calculator by the WWF

The desire to be a proper skeptical scientist is not satisfied by a website quiz alone. It cannot really help me to make a better calculation of my true footprint. But it gives you an idea, a simple estimate. And websites like these raise public awareness. To better calculate my ecological footprint I will need to dive deeper into the stuff I own and my behavior. Starting with my nice new laptop, which weighs 2.7 Kg, I can already add 10.700 Kg to my footprint. And as my former laptop I will probably use this one for 3 years so that makes 3566 Kg per year. Forget about Super Size Me, in ecological terms I’m weighing tons!

Eco friendly dish washer
In the Netherlands, Germany and other countries the company Ecover sells dishwasher and other products. From what I saw the German and US sites (the Dutch site doesn’t unfortunately) both show a clickable representation of a house. You can click on the different rooms (living room, sleeping room, kitchen, toilet, etcetera) and select eco friendly cleaning products.

We have Ecover dishwasher at home and although the bottle looks like it is made from plastic the label tells that the bottle (Fläsche), lid (Deckel) and label (Etikett) are 100% recyclable:

Seemingly little things like this really help I think, as long as more and more people are going to do it of course.  The problem is that we all together pay for the cleaning of the water. So if we make the water less dirty in the first place it will also cost less to clean. The same applies to recycling. If we find a way to cut down on waste.

All in all it looks like Germany is a good country to live in if you are concerned about the environment. Quite strange to read that my country wants to build another nuclear power station while Germany is going to close all it’s stations after the Fukushima disaster.