Day 3 began bright and early with a 5:30 a.m. wake up for a 6:00 a.m. transport to Floraholland. Aside from being a little tired, I was extremely impressed by the size and organized chaos of the factory. Every worker seemed to know where they were going and what they were doing, despite there being no obvious organization. Floraholland is the largest flower exporter in the world, with flower auctions starting at 6:00 a.m. that trade around 22 million flowers a day. The site is also the biggest building in Europe, with the whole property equaling the size of the region of Monaco!
After walking around the site for a couple hours, we were transported to the part of Amsterdam just across the river from downtown. There we walked around a large abandoned warehouse that had been turned into a modern art gallery. I then grabbed a snack from a close-by Albert Heijn before we began our tour of Schoonship.
Schoonschip is a residential community of 46 floating houses on a portion of the dam that was already dug out and had the soil destroyed by years of steel factory usage. The neighborhood houses 144 residences, with half of the 30 lots being double lots that contain two houses, and the other half functioning as single house lots. The houses are incredibly sustainable in all aspects from energy usage to material sourcing. Many of the houses use bamboo for their siding as it grows extremely fast and has low emissions during production and transport. This made me wonder why some construction companies in the United States don’t import bamboo to use as a wood supplement, but I am imagine there is a cost or emission-of-transport calculation out there that explains why. Some houses also use liquid cork and hemp clay, which are other well insulated and sustainable options, some materials I would like to see used more internationally. Each house has a green roof, which helps with insulation, as well as solar panels on both the roofs and some of the walls to collect sunlight reflected off the water, which is something I had not even considered! Overall, our tour of Schoonschip was very insightful from an engineering perspective, but also gave me some strong post-retirement plans!
