Roely Rijpkema
Last week we had our Bubble week at Texel, one full week of working hard and talking with each other about making Texel self-sufficient in 2065. We talked about several subjects like waste, food, educaton, but also mobility. We had visions about traveling in a bubble around a floating university. But this is still far away, to make this big change, first smaller steps have to be made. We mentioned the transport of goods at the Island at the moment. For processing of food, but also waste, the goods have to travel to the mainland or even further. It is sometimes possible to process on Texel, but because of regulations or economic reasons, the transport is a more suitable solution. In a lot of cases it is cheaper to transport the goods, but it would be wonderful if the transport is not needed anymore. The transport of course brings damage to the environment, but a first step in this can be changing this unsustainable transport into a sustainable version.
By changing the regular diesel trucks into sustainable trucks, the costs are around €40.000, - more expensive. The province of Friesland, one of the northern provinces of the Netherlands, came up with a new subsidy for more sustainable transport. Frisian entrepreneurs can receive subsidy for transport with cleaner fuels such as LNG and Green Gas, Pure Plant Oil (PPO) and dual fuel. This subsidy is introduces on the first of January of 2016. The additional costs of renewable trucks or ships are quite considerable. The subsidy gives €8000 per truck to entrepreneurs.
This subsidy is a good step in making entrepreneurs aware of sustainability, but I think this subsidy is not enough to make minds changing, it is only a boost for the entrepreneurs who already think about sustainability. The step is still quite big to change the transportation of the goods into a sustainable solution. I think the entrepreneurs have to be more aware of the emissions they make. To make them change their mind, the costs for transporting with polluting trucks or ships should be much higher. The subsidy is a good first step, it is helping the ones who are already thinking about being sustainable, but it would be good to challenge the ones who are not thinking about this issue. It is good that this subsidy is a possibility for entrepreneurs to be sustainable, but it is still better to transport as less as possible.