Sustainability in the City
As a trend watcher, thereās one word you cannot live without. Sustainability. It can be seen as the megatrend for the 21stcentury.
Sustainability is, of course, an interesting topic to talk about. However, itās a big one. Therefore, I wanted to narrow it done just a little to sustainability in the city. Most of the time, big cities are the most innovative and daring when it comes to new products, services or concepts. No offense to the smaller cities. Below, you can read more about the different signals that can be seen in the cities Leiden, Amsterdam and Venlo.
VerPot
VerPot is the first ever online supermarket that is also entirely plastic free. Instead of plastic packaging they use recycled glass pots and paper bags. Ramon Caljouw is the man behind the company. He came to this idea when he started separating his waste and saw how many products are unnecessarily packaged in plastic.
The reason this supermarket is not a physical store, but an online one is because of the reusable glass pots. Ramon thought it would be easier and more customer friendly if he were to deliver the groceries in their heavy pots himself and pick them up again when theyāre empty. According to him, many physical stores have gone bankrupt, because it costs a little more energy for people to carry the glass with them to the physical store, instead of throwing away their plastic waste. (VerPot, de verpakkingsvrije online supermarkt, sd)Currently, VerPot is only situated in Leiden, but you can fill in your location on their website and youāll get a notification when they are ready to deliver to a location near you!
(Remon Caljouw, Verpot, sd)
Le Compostier
Le Compostier is an idea from Rowin Snijder. He designed the first every worm hotel thatās made specifically for composting vegetable, garden and fruit (VGF) waste. After six months of composting, you are able to harvest from it. These worm hotels are made for restaurants, hotels, companies within the city and regular residents.
In Amsterdam and Amstelveen, a city south of Amsterdam, there a many different neighbourhoods in which people use these worm hotels to compost their waste. In fact, it has become so popular that Snijder goes to these neighbourhoods to give lessons in composting and regularly stops by to check on the worms. (Menkhorst, 2017)
(Le Compostier, 2017)
City Office Venlo
The municipality of Venlo has re-opened its new city office in October 2016. This new city office has been built according to the Cradle to Cradle principle. This principle is essentially a new view on sustainable design and a waste free world. The name stems from the idea of a life cycle, but instead of going from cradle to grave, it goes from cradle to cradle. To make this a little clearer: normally after using a product you throw it away, but now instead of throwing it away you use it for another product.
The building of the city office is not just sustainable, but it also positively contributes to people and the environment. By using solar panels, they use clean energy throughout the entire building. One side of the building is entirely covered in more than 100 varieties of greenery which purify the surrounding air. The greenhouse on the roof also purifies the air, but also delivers heat throughout the entire building in the winter, since the glass of the greenhouse heats up by the sun.
Within the building the recycle all the waste they produce. (City Hall Venlo more than merely sustainable, 2015)
(Mara van den Oetelaar, 2017)
Sustainability is important, because our entire future and life on this earth depend on it. Climate change has been a big issue for decades, but only recently you can see a rise in small independent companies that are trying to do something about it.
We can speak of a megatrend, because sustainability has been a known development since the late 80ās. (Do you know when sustainability first appeared?, sd)This means that it has been known for almost 40 years. Another reason why this is a megatrend is the important shift in society. People are more conscious of the way they live, and municipalities offer help, so everyone can be as sustainable as they want to be. To name an example: in many municipalities there are free plastic trash bags which are used to separate your plastic waste from the rest of your waste. Then the garbage trucks will come and gather these big bags full of plastic once every three weeks. This is just one example of how peopleās behaviour has changed over the last couple of years in favour of sustainability.
Nowadays, people value sustainability and green energy a lot more than earlier days. They feel a need for security in the future but are unable to get it due to climate change. Many also want stability for their children because they will have to live in the future that is still so unsure.
The most logical aspect to link this megatrend to is, of course, the ecological aspect. Sustainability is all about preserving the natural resources we have left and finding new alternatives for them. The rise of solar panels in the Netherlands is a great example for this. In total, there are 12 million solar panels in the Netherlands, which are being used by approximately half a million households. (Korndewal, 2018)
I think that in the future many cities will take pride in being labelled as sustainable and will motivate its inhabitants to live more consciously. Slowly but surely the entirety of the world will be immersed in sustainable and eco-friendly living.














