Written by Redwan
14 May 2015
I can bet that most of you, who haven’t been to the city of Växjö, aren’t aware of the fact that it is popularly known as the ‘Greenest city in Europe’. Now ‘Green’, by meaning, may imply different things to different people. To some it’s just trees everywhere whereas others might consider it close to less carbon emission. But regardless, both the school of meaning is right.
Växjö is the 8 largest city in Sweden, with a population of around 85-90 thousand. Very picturesque, clean and beautiful, it’s no surprise at being called the greenest city. In one of my earlier posts, I did give a brief introduction to ‘sustainability’. Simply put, it’s about being balanced in usage of the resources that are around us. The Växjö Kommun (municipality) has done a commendable job in keeping the city sustainable and setting up a system that balances itself. This is common for all the cities in Sweden, big or small. It is admirable that sustainability has been integrated into small things in our lives that we see, do and use at a daily basis.
So now you can ask me, “what’s the connection of this with ‘BUSS’”? Well for a start, ’buss’ is the Swedish word for bus. But the pronunciation is different.
Ever said the word ‘booo’? Like the way you ‘boo’ people? Now just add a ‘s’ to it. Now you got the right!
So back to the topic! What do I mean by ‘greenest buss’? In Växjö, we have an amazing system of utilizing all home–produced waste materials and turning them into fuel for the public transportation. Don’t be surprised if you see 3-4 categories of waste bags in every house. The idea behind that is to segregate different types of waste in separate bags. For example, one for organic food, one of plastics, one of hard waste like paper, boxes etc. Once disposed, they are then take to a treatment facility and sorted and turned into fuels that run the buses in the city. Sounds ‘green’, isn’t it?! 😉
So if you take a close look, this system of producing fuel to run the transportation structure is pretty smooth and self-sustaining. So basically, more waste = more fuel and every house produces some sort of waste materials anyway. And that is how the cycle continues. Thus it helps the authorities to look away from scarce resources like oil and gas and create environment-friendly or in other word sustainable way of doing things. It’s just a small example of how Swedish societies care about environment, their society, health and of course the future generations to come. Definitely something to learn from!
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Image taken from internet
