Inespo Milieu-olympiade

Toespraak door waarnemend burgemeester Asscher, 5 juni 2010 

Your Excellency, Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, 

I extend to you all a very warm welcome to Amsterdam and to the Second International Environment and Scientific Project Olympiad. 

There are four hundred school students from over thirty countries here to present their proposals for sustainable solutions to environmental problems. They are the proof that young people want to live in a better and, above all, more sustainable and cleaner world. And I think it’s wonderful that so many schools want to provide input about the environment, sustainability and combating climate change – and that this input is resulting in real proposals and action plans.  

Of course, you are not the only people who are thinking about these issues. More and more governments in more and more countries, and in cities too, are focusing on how they can contribute to sustainability. They are passing laws that impose increasingly tough requirements on those whose activities pollute the environment. The maximum quantities of harmful substances that factories, cars and commercial vehicles may emit are becoming smaller and smaller.  

Governments are working hard to encourage the reuse of such materials as plastic, glass, paper, steel and wood. They are also seeking to increase the use of electric cars. Using wind and solar energy to produce clean electricity is another major change. And there is much more going on. 

There are also growing numbers of companies that are concentrating on making plans to reduce all kinds of waste and the emission of harmful substances, and to find sustainable alternatives for all manner of activities, such as polluting manufacturing processes. One of the reasons they are doing this is that factories that emit harmful substances have to comply with the standards and are therefore searching for cleaner production methods. However, they are also doing it because in many cases a lot of money can be made through sustainable ideas.  

The result of all these activities is that the Netherlands in general and Amsterdam in particular are already very sustainable. Amsterdam is one of the five most sustainable cities in Europe for the second year in a row.  

Let me give some examples. Increasing numbers of wind turbines and solar panels are being used in Amsterdam to generate environmentally friendly electricity. Another example is the Amsterdam Waste and Energy Company, which generates heat and power by burning Amsterdam’s domestic waste.

The facility produces enough power to supply three-quarters of Amsterdam’s households with their electricity – or to keep a sixty-watt light bulb burning for two million years. Not that I know why you’d want to do that…  

Amsterdam’s trams and metro trains run on the same green electricity, and our street lighting uses only sustainable energy. Some forty-five thousand homes are also heated by waste heat from the Waste and Energy Company’s facility.  

Also a hundred and sixty Amsterdam schools will be made sustainable by insulating and ventilating them properly and making them more energy efficient. 

Boys and girls,

Governments and companies really need your help and talent in their efforts to make our world sustainable and environmentally friendly. I’m extremely curious about which of your ideas will emerge as the best one this year. 

And please remember that the ideas that don’t win can also be very important for improving our world. And whoever wins, school students from outside Amsterdam will be able to look back on a super trip to this beautiful city, the capital of the Netherlands.  

I wish you every success!