Hallo! Today, we hopped on a coach bus at the crack of dawn to head to Royal FloraHolland, one of the largest global marketplaces for flowers and plants! Royal FloraHolland has several locations, and the Aalsmeer location is home to the largest warehouse in Europe by floor space, rivaling the city-state of Monaco in size. As I walked into the enormous building, I was immediately hit with the scent of the 22 million flowers sold off at the auction daily. The chaos within the warehouse was absolutely mesmerizing – hundreds of tiny human-driven carts zipped around the cavernous space, towing towering carts of perfectly manicured plants behind them. At the same time, there were dozens of autonomous tracks that rolled the flower-filled carts to wherever they needed to go, as well as a monorail for transporting the carts across the nearby highway to the loading dock containing the buyers’ trucks.
Since the auction only runs from 6-11 AM each day, efficiency is key. Each sale is made within seconds, and Royal FloraHolland guarantees each buyer that their order will be delivered to their bay within the warehouse within 90 minutes. I quickly noticed that despite the sheer magnitude of products that needed to be maneuvered within the space, all of the factory’s operations ran very smoothly due to a combination of effective road markings, automation, and signage. The slowest part of the process was the workers assembling the individual orders by hand, and that only took a few minutes at most. It was fascinating to see how quickly a production line can move when well-coordinated and well-organized.
Once we concluded our tour of Royal FloraHolland, we started our drive towards Schoonschip, a community of floating houses within the Johan van Hasseltkanaal. The community is built on 30 concrete basins which contain either one or two 3-story homes each. Schoonschip is entirely carbon-neutral and is mostly self sufficient due to solar paneling on most of the buildings and its underwater heat pumps. However, the community’s connected “smart grid” sometimes needs to pull electricity from the city during winter, and it is still tethered to the city’s water and sewage systems as well. As I walked across the jetties between the homes, it struck me how much I would love to live in a community as independent and interconnected as Schoonschip, in which neighbors rely on each other and make decisions about maintaining their sustainable community together.
Following our visit to Schoonschip, a group of us made our way to the Rijksmuseum, one of the most famous art museums in Amsterdam! There was lots of gorgeous artwork, and I was especially drawn to the sculptures, furniture, and trinkets on display. However, when I saw the life-sized original Rembrandt painting The Night Watch, I was in awe. Once I witnessed the artistry and size firsthand, I finally understood all at once why the painting is so renowned. Additionally, I saw that the museum is actively attempting to restore the original painting by removing the old varnish on the painting, touching it up, and giving it a fresh coating and frame. After the museum, me and a couple of others grabbed dinner, and then tried some delicious Dutch stroopwafels!
Notes on Sustainability
Today, I also had new encounters with both the trams and ferries of Amsterdam. I was surprised to learn that riding the ferry to cross the IJ river was completely free of charge, and I started to wonder whether taking a public ferry is more energy-efficient than taking a bus through the tunnels to cross the river. When taking the tram, I noted the similarities to and differences from the bus system in Pittsburgh. Both the trams here and the PRT buses have buttons to declare when you want to get off at a stop, saving energy by reducing the amount of stopping and starting needed to reach your final destination. However, the trams were overall a much smoother ride because the tracks had to be relatively flat for the tram to stay on the rails, which was much more pleasant than the bone-rattling sensation of driving through potholes on the streets of Pittsburgh.
Overall, I would say that today’s adventures were a resounding success! Zie je morgen!