blog.Jelmer Oosthoek.nl

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.