Wiebe Wakker
July 6, 2016
Day 112 | Monday July 4
Last night my host Kristian got in touch with a lot of companies with the question if I could interview them and some answered very quick and positive. This morning Agnes could make some time to answer a few questions. Agnes is the founder of Bærekraftige liv. This is a community of people who take care of each other and handle resiliences in their neighborhood. For example in Norway there are 3 major supermarkets who basically decided what Norwegians eat. It’s hard to tell where the food comes from. The community decided to start producing their own food and sell this within the community.
After I interviewed Agnes I went back to Kristian’s home and worked all day. For dinner they served crab and it was the first time I had this. I thought it was more fun to brake it open then to eat it.Â
Day 113 | Tuesday July 5
I was welcomed by BIR Nett, Norway’s second biggest waste management company. They are putting in place a completely new system to collect garbage, called ‘Bossnett’. It is an automated system that transports waste underground using air pressure.
They brought me to one of the 2 collection terminals. Right now one is in place and the other one will be finished in 3 years (including the infrastructure). How it works is that citizens or companies bring their waste to a bin on the street. In the city there is always a bin within 100 meters. You can open it with a pass, drop your garbage in the bin and it falls into a bigger container. Two times a day the content is sucked through a pipe by vacuum! This pipe has a diameter of 50 meters and the machine that sucks the garbage has the power equivalent to 9000 vacuum cleaners. In the terminal the waste is collected and stored in large containers. These containers are then picked up and transferred to various recycling facilities, depending on the type of waste they contain.Â
It was time to leave Bergen. My next stop was 220km away so I knew it was going to be a long day as I had to recharge somewhere, and that point came a bit earlier as I expected. Because it was raining I lost a lot of range. I knew there was a chargepoint in Førde but I just couldn’t make that. I stopped in a tiny town and looked for a possibility to charge. I found a self-service gas station where on the side a socket was placed on the wall. There was nobody there so I thought it would be ok to take some electricity. After an hour I had 30% and was sure that I could make it to Førde. Once there I found a Gronn Kontakt station. These guys gave me a key so I could charge for free at their stations so within a short time I had enough to get to my host Asgeir in Eikefjorden. Asgeir’s address didn’t show up in my navigation so he picked me up in the centre.
Asgeir is a teacher at a high school and teaches students how to be an electrician. He thought my journey was a special project so that’s why he wanted to help me, he didn’t think that I would actually come to his place. He lives in an unique place, on the foot of a mountain with a view over the lake, quite astonishing.
My video about the Wohnwagon that went viral didn’t go unnoticed by some people and Vincent Everts, trendwatcher and EV-enthusiast wanted to know more about this. He has interviewed me before and in the first week of the trip I stayed at his place. He wanted to know how it went viral and was interested in the statistics of the video. Via Skype he interviewed me and I will post the video once he publishes it.
