Friday 21 May 2010

Of banana peels and popcorn

About two weeks ago, I met Peo and Satoko Ekberg.
Peo is from Sweden - a country that is fueling ahead to be the world's first oil-free country by 2020.This is without increasing its nuclear energy capabilities.I would call this ambition, to a point of being far fetched.,but Sweden seems to be on its way. From 70% energy from oil in 1975, today only 30% of its energy comes from oil.

So are the 9 million Swedes committed to this idea. Is it really possible to break the oil dependency and still run a first world country efficiently? From what Peo tells me, yes.

 Buses run on banana peels and kitchen waste, elevators are solar powered, taxis ferry you on coffee wastes collected from coffee shops. The capital, Stockholm, has reduced its household wastes by 97% - a big part of the garbage is  recycled into energy to power homes and transport. Public  transport in Stockholm now runs  a 100 % on bio-energy. The list goes on.

So I asked Peo, what does the city smell like with all this garbage in buses, taxis and cars?  "Oh ! Fresh popcorn".

So next time you get a whiff of fresh pop corn, remind yourself that you may not be  in a cinema house  having your favourite  popcorn,  but you are probably in Sweden, on a bus, going to  watch Bergman’s “Autumn Sonata”


3 comments:

  1. This is awesome and something we should learn from - you are fabulous

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  2. too ambitious but an effort nevertheless, it reminds of the massive experiment in Paris to provide rentable public bicycles to enable people to rent a bike to go to any part of the city and leave the bike at designated place near the destination, it was a huge success initially but when some people started misusing them, the authorities were forced to rethink.
    Anyway unless it is done we will never know if it can be done successfully and replicated elsewhere like India for e.g. that shouldn't be tough.

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  3. Amazing story! We should implement this in some University campuses in India and see how we can adapt this to bigger cities. Or has this been done in India alread?

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