Today was an early day truly focused on forms of sustainability and functional engineering. Both the main sights we saw emphasized how to think, test, and engineer sustainable alternatives to regular problems and systems to improve their viability for the future.

The first sight was the Royal FloroHolland shipment and auction company, which is the largest florist companies and auction houses in the world. FloroHolland works on shipping around 20 million flowers per day, and they start their work early in the morning and usually end in a few hours. Their plant in Amsterdam is one of the largest factories I’d personally seen, and it was perfectly organized to provide efficient and quality work. The factory was almost larger than the state of Monaco in terms of space in square meters. There were many systems that relied on electric trollies, which have low CO2 production, and these trollies could be fixed and transported across the factory with ease. Additionally, there was no flower waste to be seen across the entire facility, meaning that those 20 million or so flowers being transported were all being handled with care and respect during the entire packaging process, while still being kept efficient. This factory was a great example of efficient and sustainable engineering practices in action.

The second sight was the floating houses of Schoonschip in Amsterdam, which is a small community of around 30 floating houses. There are currently around 170 inhabitants in the community, and they are the most sustainable floating house community in Europe. The community was in development since 2008, but was finally finished in 2021, and they’ve been a live experiment of how to deal with both the environmental crisis and housing crisis of Amsterdam. The houses are all made of a thick layer of sustainable insulating material like wood wool that is surrounded on both sides by a cover like bamboo wood. The houses have green roofs, solar panels, and all generate enough electricity to support the need of the entire community. The most interesting part about the community is that they are, as mentioned earlier, a living experiment. Many of the houses are fully unorthodox designs and have experimental functions. For example, the entire town has a vacuum toilet system where the waste converted into biogas fuels. This system does not work great, and requires many more houses to produce enough biogas fuel to the point where it is usable. Additionally, the system constantly breaks down. However, besides these issues, this community provides as an example of unorthodox and novel thinking and applying of engineering principles to combat multiple problems at one. I think many communities near water could take note of Schoonschip and try to implement similar floating houses.

Overall, the tours today truly highlighted novel engineering to solve community or industrial problems while pushing forward sustainability.