Going Green in Holland

Holland prides itself on being a very environmentally friendly country, and the aspect of energy consumption I would agree. The key to my room is a little blue circle with a chip in it, and when you enter the room you have to put it in a box on the wall. Only then will the power turn on in the room, including lights and outlets. When the lights do turn on, it takes about five minutes for them to reach peak brightness and even then the light that comes out is about half as dim as normal lights in the US. This makes keeping my computer on for long periods of time impossible because my computer batter only lasts for four hours. I have to shut it down and restart every time I leave and come back. They also try to conserve heat by turning the heat in my building down to 60 degrees at night, as discussed in a previous post. This is all great, but the thing is, it’s not easy to find recycling bins here! I haven’t seen nearly as many recycle bins in public places here as in some other cities in Europe. One interesting thing, though, is that glass and plastic bottles can be recycled at the grocery store. You just take your bottles back, put them in a machine, and get a receipt which gives you a rebate for recycling them. Today I turned in four bottles and got a rebate of €1.00 which was put towards decreasing my grocery bill. During a corporate visit to Heineken, there were two sections in the production facility: one for producing beer for domestic consumption and one for exporting. The section for domestic production had an extra step for cleaning the bottles, because the same bottle is used 30 times before being scrapped. The bottles for export are used only once. Quite a difference.