ecological awareness

Noise reduction is pursued actively in Essen, with ambitious and effective Noise Action Plans and public participation. The company LK Argus GmbH has identified potential areas for designation as "Quiet Zones". To determine this, an overall noise map was prepared, which forms the acoustic basis for the overlapping representation of the individual noise emission sources. "Quiet Zones" in the region should be proposed, and should be forest environments, parks, green areas, and leisure and recreation  areas.

Currently, we use 80% of the arable land we have access to globally. In the future, without significant change in today’s food production, it is estimated that at least 10-15% of the global vegetable production must take place inside cities by 2050 in order to maintain our current growth and consumption patterns.

In a rapidly urbanising world cities need to become smarter to respond to citizen needs and to reduce their environmental footprint. GrowSmarter brings together cities and industry to integrate and demonstrate ‘12 smart city solutions’ in energy, infrastructure and transport, to provide other cities with valuable insights on how they work in practice and opportunities for replication.

In Sweden more than 99 per cent of all household waste is recycled in one way or another. This means that the country has gone through something of a recycling revolution in the last decades, considering that only 38 per cent of household waste was recycled in 1975.
Today, recycling stations are as a rule no more than 300 metres from any residential area. Most Swedes separate all recyclable waste in their homes and deposit it in special containers in their block of flats or drop it off at a recycling station. Few other nations deposit less in rubbish dumps.

The European Energy Award supports municipalities willing to contribute to sustainable energy policy and urban development through the rational use of energy and increased use of renewable energies. There are more than 1,400 municipalities participating today.

Gate 21 brings together municipalities, regions, businesses and knowledge and research institutions to develop and disseminate energy and resource-efficient solutions that promote green transition and growth. Gate 21’s vision is to make Greater Copenhagen the leading region in the world for green transition and growth. The strategy is based on the use of regional and local demand to develop, demonstrate and deploy new energy and resource-efficient solutions in the area of climate and energy.

Tesla is partnering with South Australia’s Labor government to create the world’s largest virtual power plant, consisting of 50,000 homes fitted with solar panels and the company’s Powerwall 2 home battery unit. The $800 million project will have roughly six times more energy storage capacity than Tesla’s massive Powerpack farm at the Hornsdale wind farm near Jamestown.

Amazon opened a rainforest-like office space in Seattle that it hopes will spark new ideas for employees. Company office towers and high-end eateries have taken the place of warehouses and parking lots in Seattle’s South Lake Union district. The Spheres complex, officially open to workers on Tuesday, is the pinnacle of a decade of development here. The Spheres’ three glass domes house some 40,000 plants of 400 species. Amazon, famous for its demanding work culture, hopes the Spheres’ lush environs will let employees reflect and have chance encounters, spawning new products or plans.

The residents of Kamikatsu, a town of 1,700, sort their trash into 34 different categories. It may seem like an overkill, but the small Japanese town, with a population of just over 1,700, is on a mission to become the country’s first ‘zero-waste’ community by 2020. And, they’re almost there. Kamikatsu already recycles about 80 percent of its trash, with the last 20 percent going into a landfill. That progress is 12 years in the making.

Leading Cities is a global leader in Smart City solutions, city diplomacy and collaboration advancing sustainability and resilient city strategies and technologies. With its global network of world-class cities, Leading Cities has built bridges to share best practices, urban solutions and lessons learned among city leaders while breaking down barriers within cities by engaging each of the five sectors of the Quintuple-helix (Q-helix): Public, Private, Non-profit, Academia and Citizenry.