Every April
22nd, we celebrate Earth Day. People all across the world spend this day
supporting environmental protection, and every year there is a spesific focus.
April 22nd 2014 is the day of Green
Cities!
A few
kilometres outside the capital of Norway, lies a tiny city called Sandvika.
This is where we go to school, and even though Sandvika isn’t much of a city,
we want to look at its role as a Green City. Sandvika mainly consists of a
shopping mall; nevertheless, it’s the largest mall in all of Scandinavia. The
mall has numerous customers and visitors each day, and these people need to go
to the restroom. The amount of paper towels these people would consume each day
would be enormous, but Sandvika shopping mall won’t have any of that! In every
restroom in the mall, there are 25 cm by 25 cm cloth towels for you to wipe
your hands on after washing them. Instead of throwing these away after use,
they are washed and reused. In the long run, this is a lot more beneficial to
the environment than using paper towels. Other than the environmental
perspective, there are several perks to the cloth towels; they feel luxurious,
they don’t make a mess in public restrooms and they can absorb a lot more water
than a single paper towel. We hope our school will follow the trend, and stop
contributing to taring down the Amazons!
The cloth
towels will, however, not make our city green on their own. The public
transportation around the capital is quite significant in this regard. All of
the busses in our county run on biogas. This gas produced by the breakdowns of
sewer and food waste, and emits 90 per cent less CO2 than the diesel used in most busses. Recycling
sewer and food waste is also very beneficial to the environment.
Our city
could definitely be “greener”, but the cloth towels and biogas busses are good
examples of what we aim to achieve. There are plans for parts of the city to be
rebuilt, so let’s hope the people responsible have green minds!
