Thijs Schaap
Monday
Why don’t these people like wind energy?! It is the Monday of the Island week and we have been travelling to Texel. It is very rainy (can’t we capture some energy from that?!) and windy (6 beaufort, the weather report says) on the island. This seems to be the case every time that I am on Texel, so the stance of the Texelaars against wind energy is rather unfortunate for their sustainable transition plans. This week we will experience Texel in all its aspects and see how we can contribute to its sustainable transition.
Tuesday
Today we met with Maarten Dijker, the mushroom farmer that we already mentioned in the report. It turns out that the way he grows his mushrooms at the moment, does already use waste products and his entire production process has evolved to his needs. Moreover, he knows how to influence his process to increase his output if the demand is high in the summer and he can keep it low in the winter if there are far less tourists on the island. The mushroom output is influenced by the temperature and humidity in the growing chamber and the amount of mushroom baaltjes are currently active. At optimal conditions, one mushroom baaltje can be harvested twice per day! Therefore, Maarten can adopt his output to the demand. Last quarter I followed a course on supply chain management and the entire process was a pretty neat example of Just in Time logistics. I’m pretty sure that my supply chain management teacher would be proud on him. It left him with a large dependency on his supplier of mushroom baaltjes, who is a friend of him in Eindhoven that produces these from waste from the wood industry on an industrial scale. Therefore, 98% of the baaltjes are of a quality that is good enough to grow mushrooms on. Altering the process to grow mushrooms on coffee waste, would largely decrease this percentage and is therefore not interesting for Maarten. There goes our case study… It is time for change!
Wednesday
Guess what, the Texelaars are apparently really innovative and already do a lot of the blue economy principles, they just don’t call it that way. It is called; De Texelse Manier and the main driver is cutting on costs, because it is just more expensive to import something from the overkant. For instance, sharing some old furniture of one of the beach restaurants (waste) with De Verzamelpost. However, these people also apparently have a tendency not to talk to eachother and these exchanges are not that common… we will now try to facilitate these kind of solutions with a new platform that we are not going to call a platform, because that sounds lame according to Caroline. We also found out that Valerie of De Verzamelpost is already doing something similar to our initiative. We could collaborate with her!
Everything beyond this is hypothetical because I finished the column on wednesday. Is this how the week will end?
(Thursday)
Today we finished all our work. Somehow we excluded almost everything from the final chapter that we didn’t write on Texel. At least we can offer a true made in Texel product… My three group mates are wizards with the Adobe Photoshop family, so our final document even looks authentic!
(Friday)
Today we presented our final proposal to the aldermen of Texel. The aldermen were very enthusiastic about Sophie and initially thought she was real. The fact that Sophie was in fact Lucas was a bit of a disappointment, but we made this up by our final presentation. Valerie promised us already that she will seriously look at our proposal. Hopefully we made a true impact!