Created by Stefan Olsthoorn

When I was asked for my sustainability hero in class, a lot of different people came to mind. I thought of an innovator like Elon Musk from Tesla, or the artist Daan Roosegaarde, who came up with the ‘smart highway’ concept and the ‘smog vacuum cleaner’. I eventually went with Herman Wijffels, of whom I recently attended a Studium Generale talk . In this talk mister Wijffels explained his vision…

The Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde has recently gained a lot of media attention with his smart highway   concept. In this concept he envisions the roads of the future. According to Roosegaarde, future roads should be interactive by using light, energy and road signs.  The first experimental trajectories have already been realised in cooperation with Heijmans N.V. Near Nuenen a bicycle lane has…

The topic of my column for this week is maybe not directly related to Texel but a somewhat more personal story.Three years ago I made a trip to Cape Town, South-Africa, to visit a friend who was at that time doing an internship for a NGO in the townships of Cape Town. We went to visit her office in Khayelitsha, which is the largest of the townships in the area. This was a very impressing, but…

In November of this year Dutch newspapers reported on a research conducted by the NLVOW, an organisation that defends the interests of people living in the vicinity of windmills. The research critiqued the fact that a lot of relative young windmills are currently being replaced. The problem is that these windmills are too old to qualify for SDE+ subsidies, although they are still functioning…