Day 12, our last day in the Netherlands, was a relaxed ending to our amazing trip. We started our morning with a visit to the Floating Farm. Karel, our guide, explained how the farm was inspired by a floating cities presentation that Minke and Peter, the two founders, went to in New York right around Hurricane Sandy. It was originally an experiment to test how urban environments could have access to fresh produce, but it evolved into a successful business. For a dairy farm, which usually have high green house gas emissions, the Floating Farm is relatively green and sustainable. It’s a vertical farm that uses the top layer for cows, the second for dairy processing, and the third for cheese aging and plant growth. It also has a floating solar panel array that supports a portion of the farms energy, the cows diet includes leftover food waste and collected rain water that is purified, and to reduce ammonia pollution, they use a system that turns collected cow urine and manure into water and biobased products. After saying hello to some cows and trying some milk (it was really good!), we hopped on a water taxi to head over to RDM.

RDM is an innovation hub and applied science building used by students and businesses as a space to develop and house new projects. Peter, our tour guide, explained how it used to be the biggest shipyard in Holland, and he and four generations of his family had worked there, but eventually the Port Authority bought the building and transitioned it into the makerspace it is now. While walking around, we saw a few cool projects that different students and companies were working on. The two that I found most interesting were a magnetic levitation, hyperloop train development team working on the future of continental travel, and a olivine material company that develops olivine concrete, similar to normal concrete, and sells it to companies to use instead of concrete because it has a negative carbon emission as the silicate in the olivine reacts with carbon dioxide, allowing the material to function as a carbon sink to be used to pull CO₂ out of the air.

We finished our last day with a commencement dinner at Bazar, a Turkish restaurant in Rotterdam. Though I am excited to sleep in my own bed again, I am going to miss the Netherlands and the amazing friends I have made on this trip. The Dutch emphasis on sustainability has given me hope that a similar mindset can be applied in the United States, and I will forever keep sustainable practices in mind because of this experience. Thank you Pitt Plus3, and thank you Dr. Kerzmann, Dr. Dukes, and our wonderful chaperone Brian for making this study abroad experience memorable, informative, and fun!