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Monthly archives: February 2010

Being the green capital

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The closeness to nature and outdoor life is one of the greatest things about Stockholm. Photo: Henrik Trygg/Stockholm Visitors Board.

2010 Stockholm is appointed Europé’s Green capital and seminars about different aspects of this are held all over the city. Yesterday I attended one of them, listening to Ulla Hamilton who is vice mayor and responsible for environment and traffic in Stockholm.

Less than 300 meters

She pointed out that Stockholm has quite a long tradition of working with environmental issues and presented a whole lot of figures to be proud of. We have a unique access to large green areas inside and close to the city. In fact, 95 percent of the population here is said to live less than 300 meters away from a green open space. A new urban district is planned with special environmental consideration and for 2050 the goal by the city council is to be wholly independent of fossil fuels.

Statistic lottery

But statistics can be tricky, though. One of the figures used a lot to describe how green we Stockholmers are, is the per capita emissions of CO2. The average in Sweden is about 6 tons/person and year, but in Stockholm we are down at 3,4 . Although people are good at using the public transport system and cycling, I couldn’t quite understand that. So I asked a person from the city council how this was calculated and he explained to me that that all the activities in the municipality are counted, but not what happens above 100 meters and not what we consume which is produced elsewhere. That makes it advantageous for us, since only the start and landing part of our flights are counted, and since the municipality doesn’t have a lot of heavy industries.

In that way I must admit I feel a bit like having been given the right lottery ticket. Worse, though, for the inhabitants of Oxelösund, where a lot of heavy industry is situated. In the statistics every person in their municipality accounts for 134 tons/year…

 

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

February 26, 2010

Cutting out the food additives

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muffins
Muffins I know every ingredient of, since I added it myself…

Feeling tempted by a guacamole containing only 1,5 percent avocado? Or a bread spread which is made of fat hardened with hydrogen gas and nickel?
A few years ago the journalist and writer Mats-Eric Nilsson wrote a book called “Den hemlige kocken” (The secret cook), which shocked many readers. The book contains the stories about what we are actually eating when we put what we believe is “farmhouse bread”, balsamic vinegar or strawberry jam in our mouths.

Not automatically bad

The debate following the book has definitely made many consumers in Sweden more conscious about additives and now more and more companies use the absence of additives in their products as a sales argument. One still has to be aware of that an added ingredient does not automatically mean something bad. I find it difficult to be roused to indignation by a bit of salt or by pectin, which you can find naturally in apples and is used to stabilize marmalade. But there sure are things that are more difficult to categorize as food.

Glueing the meat

The latest discussion on this theme is the “meat glue”, which has added a new word to the Swedish vocabulary. The European Union recently took a first step towards approval of the coagulation protein thrombin, which can be used to stick different small pieces of meat into one. The decision has caused a lot of debate and on a blog about “pure food” 1 800 persons have signed a petition against the meat glue in one week.

DIY 

I suppose one way of knowing what you are eating is making it yourself. As a city dweller I’m not at all there, but buying simple raw ingredients and cooking and baking on your own works quite well too. As the local transport system is paralysed by heavy snow falls I have spent more time in my local neighbourhood, baking muffins. Buckwheat with apple and cinnamon turned out to be a nice combination.

 

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

February 24, 2010

Borrow a designer dress

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clothes-library
Ready to be lended.

Earlier I have written about how people have started to swap things with each other instead of buying everything new. But this weekend Stockholm experienced another phenomenon in this genre: the clothes library. As Stockholm Fashion Week has been going on, the concept of borrowing clothes has been tried out at the Ecoteque in the cultural centre Kulturhuset.

Trying on the evening gowns

Fifteen minutes after opening the Ecoteque was already full of people crowding around the clothes stands, flickering through both new, designer outfits and vintage garments. In the fitting rooms people were trying on everything from neat shirts to fantastic evening gowns and after filling out a form they could take the garment home for one week. I spoke to two Finnish visitors, who had just arrived in Stockholm for the art fair Supermarket and wanted to complete their light luggage with some sensational clothes for going out Saturday night.

24 kilos of textiles

I find this an excellent way of renewing one’s wardrobe without overusing resources. Faster and faster changes in fashion have led to a situation where the average Swede buys 24 kilos of textiles every  year. That is 9 kilos more than in 1994. So I hope this idea has come to stay. And why not extend this concept to other areas, so that we can borrow tools as drilling-machines at the library instead of everyone getting their own and using it once a year?

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

February 22, 2010

Making more conscious travel choices

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travel-comparer
Comparison of a short distance in Lund.

Ever wondered what difference it makes if you go by bike or by car to work? Now the municipality of Lund in southern Sweden has launched a service which will provide its inhabitants with good arguments to think their transportation choices over. The travel comparer (only in Swedish, though) lets you point out departure and arrival addresses and then calculates how long it would take you to get there by walking, cycling, by car or by bus. Not only that, it also calculates the price of the trip, how much CO2 it will emit – alternatively how many calories it will burn, if you are using your own muscles as fuel.

Everyone can contribute

One nice thing about it is that it uses OpenStreetMap, which is like a global Wikipedia for maps. The idea is everyone who lives in the area and uses the roads can share their best routes. One of the developers of the service says in a press release that it took just a few hours after the launching of the site before someone had added a new route.

The bike won

In the example above, where I just chose to go from a random spot to the central station in Lund, you can see that the fastest alternative is actually to go by bike (The column at the top is time, after that distance, price/trip, price/year, CO2 emissions/trip, CO2 emissions/year, and calories.)
As someone has pointed out, the calculations do not take into account for example steep hills, which would make cycling a bit harder. But maybe the OpenStreetMap will have functions for that as well, in time.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

February 18, 2010

Enjoying the cold part III: Ice-skating

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long-distance-skates
The long-distance kind of ice-skate. Photo: Patrik Eriksson/Flickr.

In my quest to make the most of these cold months, I have finally challenged my fear of bare ice and gone ice-skating. When I went to school we did it, but using the ice-hockey kind of skates is a whole different story than the long-distance kind people use outside. All over the Stockholm area, tracks are now cleared for skaters, sometimes more than 10 km long.

20 centimeters

For some time I have been sceptical. How great can it be to slide around, with the ever-present threat of falling and banging one’s head in stone hard ice? And what if the ice breaks?
After months of patient persuasion, I finally followed a friend out yesterday, fastened a pair of borrowed long-distance skates on my feet and gave it a go. Knowing that the ice was more than 20 centimetres thick I thought that it is now or never.
It is not easy. But after the initial Bambi-like attempts, legs going in their own directions, I actually started to like it. Gliding over the black ice, the only sound coming from the edges of the skates, trees full of snow around the lake, it is a very special way of being in nature.

Easier to work

After that excursion it was actually a lot easier to return to the office to get the latest issue of our climate magazine Effekt ready to go to print. During the last month we have been working hard, researching, writing articles about peak oil and what the implications of more expensive energy might be for society, editing articles from freelancers, finding photographers, etcetera etcetera. Sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be any time to go outside. But with time I have learnt that spending too much time in front of a desk actually makes me stupid. If I get stuck with a problem I usually won’t find the solution until I give up and go out for a walk.

Good for the brain

And yesterday I read an article confirming my theory: When changing the body temperature, blood flows to more parts of the brain than just the one you were desperately trying to activate. And when more parts of the brain are processing the problem subconsciously, a solution might just appear unexpectedly.
That is why there is no coincidence that many good ideas are born far away from the desk. Which is also a very good excuse for me to keep on taking my strolling breaks.

 

Below a video of what long-distance ice-skating in the archipelago of Stockholm can be like. Let’s just say that I am not quite there yet… 

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

February 15, 2010