Goedeavond! It’s officially day 3 in the Netherlands. We started with an early morning wake-up at 6am to be able to get to our private transfer to Royal Flora Holland. Royal Flora Holland is a company that focuses on auctioning flowers and leaves from all over the world! We were able to walk a 2km track that went around the packaging and sorting part of the process, and they told us this was only 10% of the whole company!? Moreover, we learned that they sell more than 22 million plants a day and sort them to the rest of the world. As for the actual location, they taught us that the entire company is the size of the country of Monaco. As for the action process, they use a Dutch auctioning clock, which goes type of flower by type of flower, starting the bid at a higher price and then immediately going down until somebody claims it. Definitely looking at it from an outside perspective was extremely unbelievable, seeing how fast the bid went and how people from all across the world are bidding on these every day. On a more sustainable side, the workers travel around in carts that make them move around the entire facility more easily. These carts, we learned, are battery-powered and rechargeable.

Afterwards, we headed over to Schoonschip. This place is a village of floating houses that focuses mainly on sustainability. They had so many initiatives to make the houses 90% sustainable. The first one was obviously using solar panels in every single house, and they connected the electricity from the solar panels between each house so that if someone had less energy than another, energy was transferred between houses. Moreover, they also have a heating system using the same water from the canal that goes through tubing under the house as heating. Things like these initiatives make the village almost 90% sustainable, both helping the housing crisis and helping the world overall.