Hotels in Amsterdam

Go green & lower carbon footprints – Says Amsterdam

Amsterdam is a much developed city but has kept itself comparatively environment friendly by retaining its bike culture and also generating electricity used to power trams and light buildings from burning municipal waste. The people of this city emit half as much greenhouse gas per capita, as Americans do.

However, Amsterdam still feels that it owes much to the environment and in its attempt to go greener, the city plans to lower its carbon footprint by 40 percent in 2025 by aggressively going green.

Maurits Gruen, a part of Amsterdam’s Climate Bureau, says, “We envision a plan that the municipality of Amsterdam itself will be climate neutral by 2015.  And that the city at large will be reducing its CO2 footprint by 40 percent in 2025.”

And just how will Amsterdam do it within its self-imposed deadline, 2025? The city has a multifaceted strategy to follow replacing a thousand garbage trucks and other municipal vehicles with vehicles that run on electricity.  Within six years it aims to switch all the light bulbs in streetlamps and municipal buildings to LEDs.

Gruen says, “In the street lighting, it will be over 93 percent so we will almost annihilate the electricity consumption from the lighting in the streets, and the same holds true for electricity consumption in the buildings that the government uses.”

In an attempt to make the houses and buildings carbon neutral, all the old buildings will be given new windows and insulation.

Gruen explains, “The new buildings from next year on will be carbon neutral, which means that we will not need any fossil fuel to heat those buildings.”

He adds, “In the first place, well we have the houses closed to the north and open at the south where the sun’s coming in. Then we collect all the heat by very efficient insulation. We have solar collectors, we have photovoltaic cells.

Gruen, with a note of warning and urgency, says, “Amsterdam is situated below sea level, and we are very much aware that we need to do something against global warming because otherwise we won’t be there.”