Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

You may have heard of BYOB, but what about BYOC? In China and Japan, tens of thousands of restaurant- and cafeteria-goers bring their own reusable chopsticks. Eateries are now rewarding this practice by providing discounts on meals or free bowls of soup.
Photo by Ryan Chirnomas (cc).

*Did you know? In China alone, 25 million trees are made into chopsticks each year.



 

A new nightclub in Rotterdam, Netherlands taps into an underappreciated energy source—the clubbers themselves, who power the place through their own dancing feet. The floor of Club Watt contains springs and magnets that convert downward movement into energy. It is estimated that about 2,000 people need to be moving at any given time to keep the place bright.
Photo by Gabriel (cc).

*Did you know? The average club uses 150 times the power of a normal household.

 

Finland has an amazingly effective returnable deposit system for beverage bottles and cans. Nearly 99 percent of bottles purchased and 86 percent of cans are returned. Instead of being immediately crushed to produce new bottles, a typical glass bottle is refilled and resold 30 times. Finnish companies that produce beverages are given favorable tax rates or tax exemptions for using refillable or recyclable containers. Only about three percent of packaging in the Finnish brewing and soft drinks industry is disposable.
Photo by Daniel Stone (cc).

*Did you know? The United States used to refill beverage containers, but the beer and soft-drink industries in the United States have replaced many refillable glass bottles with single-use plastic bottles and aluminum cans. In 1960, 95 percent of soft drinks were sold in glass bottles; now, only one percent are packaged in glass.

 

In Easington, UK garbage left next to garbage bins will no longer be collected, and second bins will not be collected unless the people living in the house are a family of six or more. The measure motivates residents to recycle and to think more carefully about their trash.
Photo by Dave Hamster (cc).

*Did you know? The average American generates four pounds of solid trash each day, or roughly 1,500 pounds of trash every year.

 

Curitiba, Brazil boasts a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system—and no, that is not an oxymoron. The buses run frequently—some as often as every 90 seconds—and the stations consist of raised platforms so that passengers can easily file in and out, as they would on a metro, without having to climb stairs. And, like a metro, you pay before entering the platform area. Curitiba has brilliantly circumvented the prohibitively high cost of creating a subway system; meanwhile, 70 percent of Curitiba’s commuters, rich and poor, use the system to travel to work. Compared to eight other Brazilian cities of its size, Curitiba uses about 30 percent less fuel per capita, resulting in one of the lowest rates of ambient air pollution in the country.
Photo by Thomas Hobbs (cc).

*Did you know? The energy consumption of a bus, measured in energy per passenger per kilometer, is one-third that of a car.