Right after we woke up, we left to catch the train to Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Work was being done on the roads on campus, so we had to walk on a beautiful, wooded path for around 20 minutes before making it to the university. Once we did arrive, however, we immediately went to The Green Village, a testing ground for sustainable innovations, most of which are students’ capstone projects or work for graduate programs.
The Green Village was home to many great ideas that strove to either improve upon existing practices or prove that it is possible to implement ideas into our neighborhoods that may seem incredibly far-fetched. One of the ideas to prove feasibility was the use of bricks without glue or adhesive to build a bridge and a house. Our tour guide explained to us how adhesives often pose harm to our environment, so they found a way to eliminate the need for them altogether in some construction. The magic behind this innovation is an interlocking technology, where one side of the brick protrudes out and the other in, providing a place for the other brick to rest and letting friction keep it in place. We know that this innovation proved effective, as the bridge that led into the Green Village, unbeknownst to us, was made of these very bricks and was able to hold at least ten of us at the same time.
Another innovation that we were taught about was a house that included a removable room. The house was primarily made of brick, but the back patio was merely a frame filled with glass. The idea behind this innovation is to provide users with accessible seasonal customization of their homes without needing to do extra work, harming the environment, to add an extension, for example. Some of these uses could potentially include removing the glass walls in the summer to store gardening/lawn care tools inside, or having a space in the winter to store items that would otherwise be damaged in the snow. Some of the glass panels also had solar cells embedded within them, which would help provide extra clean power, both making the house more environmentally sustainable and lowering energy costs for the homeowner.
Yet another, and my favorite innovation that we came across today, was called the 24-7 Energy Lab, which aims to solve the issues of harnessing too much energy on a single grid. One issue that arises with several forms of renewable energy is that they can begin to produce congestion in power grids when added to standard, less sustainable energy production methods, such as burning fossil fuels. The 24-7 Energy Lab attempts to solve this problem by converting some of the energy to hydrogen atoms, which are stored in tanks for future use, helping us avoid reaching the absolute capacity limits of our power grids.
Once we finished walking through each sustainable design, we left the Green Village and had some free time before heading to a climate workshop in one of the classrooms. Some of us decided to look around the various engineering buildings on campus, checking out the libraries, study spaces, classrooms, labs, and specialty equipment rooms. Then, we looked in the main campus library, and it was filled with comfortable seats, study spaces were along the walls, books covered the entirety of the back wall, and there was (what appeared to be) a computer lab on the upper level. Needless to say, I fully understood how TU Delft was named one of the best technical schools in the world after scouting around some of the buildings on campus.
Once we made it to the climate workshop, we were first split into groups of five or six, and given the task to arrange a continually growing set of flashcards, each showing one aspect of climate change (such as human activity, water temps rising, decreasing marine biodiversity, etc.), and create a climate fresk (basically a flowchart). I found this activity to be incredibly thought-provoking, as I hadn’t before realized the sheer magnitude of how human activity (the top of the fresk) negatively affected our environment, at least in terms of unique effects on our world. I also hadn’t considered how many looping structures there would be in the sketch, showing how any human activity can lead to negative effects, which in turn consistently create more negative effects without the help of human activity.
After finishing the climate fresks, we were tasked with brainstorming some policies that could help to address some of the negative effects. My group came up with several good ideas, such as reforming education to include climate change information, subsidizing sustainable goods and taxing harmful goods, and funding programs to help those who are marginalized/in need. We then had to rank our proposals in terms of how difficult they would be to implement, along with how effective they would probably be if they were implemented. Overall, I feel that the climate workshop was a valuable way to see climate change with a fresh pair of eyes and begin to think about how we might be able to change our world for the better.