blog.Jelmer Oosthoek.nl

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.