The Horse 2020/21

Soil Fertility - edX Programme 

Farmers want to realize an optimal crop yield, with a good crop quality. The key to this, is to have a fertile soil. 

1. When plants are growing, they form roots in the soil.
2. Soil is composed of a matrix of minerals, organic matter, air, and water.
3. Plants use their roots to take up nutrients, which they need to grow.
4. But plants can only take up nutrients from water. In other words, plants do not eat soil,
5. rather their roots take up nutrients that are dissolved in what we call the soil solution.

Another important aspect of a fertile soil is a good soil structure so that plants can penetrate and explore the soil with their roots. A fertile soil also has to supply sufficient water to plants.

Fertilily = Fruchtbarkeit 

Crop quality = Pflanzenqualität

Crop yield = Ernteertrag

Information Source eDx programme: Soil Fertility

Emre & Tonia

WWTP; WasteWaterTreatmentPlant

The WWTP treatment plan is executed in 3 steps. Each of these steps is crucial for clean water. 

Step I) is to get rid of fats or oils by using a "pre-treatment".

Step II) is responsible for biological treatment of organic particles in the waste water. In order to do so, the plant has to work through several technically hight maintenance processes. 

Step III) During the biological process, a mixture of bacteria creates some sort of "dirt" (Schlamm). This dirt is being removed in a different pool of the plant. 

The Waste Water Treatment Plant in Wolfhausen is about as big as 2/3 of a football field. Since there is another one in Bubikon which is the same district (Gemeinde), which means it covers an area of about 3500 people. 

 Kläranlage Schachen in Wolfhausen

The wind is a clean, free, and readily available renewable energy source. Each day, around the world, wind turbines are capturing the wind’s power and converting it to electricity. Wind power generation plays an increasingly important role in the way we power our world – in a clean, sustainable manner. More...

We have come to an end with our research concerning circular economy. 

It has been a very interesting and informative journey but it was worth it. We learned what circular and linear economy is, what it does, what de consequences are and how we can prevent the litter production with our own efforts. We tried to keep you on track with our research by posting a lot of content through these weeks. 

Attached you find all of our research in a file. Since we do not want to make one huge post that takes up space on The Horse, we welcome and encourage you to have a look into this file. 

Circular Economy.docx (626,01 kb)

Following the file, we have a little quiz prepared for you in order to test your improvement concerning circular economy. To do the quiz you must have some knowledge about circular economy. Either you read all of our posts or you read the file and get all the facts you need. 

Circular Economy Quiz!

(MS Forms)

Thank you very much for your attention and your interest in our research. Do not forget how important our environment is. So do not hold back on getting as much information about it as possible. Circular Economy is our past our present and especially our future and it will only get better if we all becoma a part of it. 

Sincerely 

Chiara & Tonia

Today we read through some posts on dontwastemy.energy, to get some ideas on how we should write our own content. Our goal is to publish our work and ideas on the website and receive some positive feedback. Furthermore we want to bring all our research on one page and make it as understandable as possible. 

Apart from that there will not be an informative post today, since we did not really do anymore research on our topic. Nevertheless we will continue our research next week and hopefully be able to publish some new facts, figures and diagramms. 

Sincerely

Chiara & Tonia

The linear Economy

In this post we are not really going into circular economy. We are focusing on the opposite of circualr economy, the linear economy. 

The main goal of circular economy is to reuse and recycle the materials of a product, whereas linear economy does not take care of the environment like that. Linear economy simply produces products with certain materials and does not resue them. 

How resources are increasingly difficult to extract / linear economy

With mining and digging we are able to collect important materials and goods from way underground. The goal is to make good use of these, so to make good and practical materials with a lucrative price out of them. But what is the problem with linear economy like this?

A linear Economy relies on cheap energy, cheap materials and cheap credit to get the throughput. Which means, that the companies can make ends meet with their costs of production and people who work in these companies. Sadly, the environment which we extract the materials from, is not being taken care of.

We need an economic system that does help the environment. September 2008 taught us things, when the financial system was collapsing. This crisis turned the economy upside down.

The Linear Economy is not working very well. There are three reasons for this:

• Resources like fossil fuels, food and water are increasingly hard to get.
• Biodiversity is in decline worldwide. Yet ecological services provided by the natural world seem to be taken for granted.
• The financial system almost crashed the entire economy.

   

   

Why is it difficult for companies to be innovative

The competition is so high and intense, that it has become more and more difficult for companies to sell their products. It has become critical for companies to male good profits or even survive. The other side is that customers cant be easily persuaded to buy a certain product that offer fair trade or other environmental friendly.

• Real wages have been stagnant or falling for several decades.
• This has resulted in intense competition among companies selling products and services, and in an unfavorable market position for environmentally or socially benign products (these often cost more).
• The 3 billion new customers entering the market in the next 20 to 30 years will put an enormous pressure on the resource base if we continue along our current, linear ways.

So this is what we got so far concerning linear economy. We hope that we would show the difference between circular economy and linear economy in a simple way. We are happy to read your comments. :) 

Sincerely 

Chiara & Tonia 

It is week two of our research concerning circular Economy. We would like to share our newest information and facts.

What is circular economy?

The Circular Economy System Diagram, also known as the 'Butterfly Diagram', represents flows of products and materials in the Circular Economy.

The diagram starts from the current Linear Economy, depicted as the central, downwards flow from materials extraction and manufacturing at the top to incineration and landfill at the bottom. In the Circular Economy, resources are used, but not used up.

Why we need circular Economy

To limit the extraction of raw materials and reduce the production of waste

In the post war era, we could have things and pay later which lead to a massive boom. The fact, that this system is not there anymore is proof, that we change economy.

By applying suitable strategies to products, components and materials during use and after the end of a lifecycle, resources are kept in the system.

Cycles in Circular Economy

In a circular system, technical and biological nutrients, or materials, are retained in continuous loops. The circular flow of these nutrients is represented by the loops on either side: green for biological and blue for technical nutrients.

Biological materials can be safely returned to the biosphere and add value to the environment, once they have gone through one or more use cycles. These materials include food, natural fibres and bio-based materials, such as wood.

Technical materials cannot be returned to the biosphere. These materials should continuously cycle through the system so that their value can be (re)captured. These materials include plastics, metals and synthetic chemicals.

Scroll through the slides below to explore the Butterfly Diagram in detail. The Butterfly Diagram is the backbone of this course. In the coming episodes, you'll be introduced in more detail to the different loops.

Industrial Ecology

• Industrial Ecology is concerned with the study of material and energy flows through industrial systems.
• Industrial Ecology and the Circular Economy share similar goals and principles.

This is our latest research. We would also like to make futher investigations concerning the linear economy. Thank you for showing interest in our research. We hope you could learn something useful. 

Sincerely

Chiara & Tonia

Our project is slowly taking shape.

we are currently working through the introduction programme on EDX, a platform where lots of universities show their studies. 

Further steps are to finish the introduction programme whilst making notes and creating a factsheet about the most important informations. After the introduction programme there is a a bit more enhanced [programme which we will have to work through as well. But for now all we do is make progress work step by step. 

So far we have learned about Circular Economy and its four principles, as well as examples for each principle.

• Waste = food 
• Build resilience through diversity
• Work with energy from renewable sources (such as the sun)
• We need to think in systems! (only if we think in systems we can enhance society, environment and economy)

Examples of the four principlesMore...

A normal day, you go out to get lunch. You choose take away food to eat on a bench or somewehere and what do you get? Plastic wrapping. A plastic box together with matching plastic spoon, fork and knive, that you use for about 15 minutes until you have finished lyour food. After that, the packaging ends up in a normal rubbish bin, because you do not have the time to look for a recycling bin. 

This is actually unnessecary rubbish that could be easily replaced by biodegradable boxes and wrappings. This cardboard-ish invention can be thrown into bio-waste or any other rubbish bin. (Another idea would be if people could simply bring their own boxes, such as tupperware. Then the food would only be weighted and no rubbish is generated.)

This change is neither very expensive nor does it take more time or efford which makes it a perfect way for restaurants to start being eco-friendly. Customers surely would appreciate. 

The first image shows the plastic wrappings we all know already. They are not reusable and need to be recycled which is annoying to lots of people. The second picture contains these new, biodegradable packages. (They do not give any nasty taste to the food inside) They can be thrown into any rubbish bin there is. (Rice up! at the Zurich main station is already using these boxes) 

This is our idea on how we want to make a change. 

Chiara & Tonia

Over hundreds of years we somehow managed to use a great deal of your fossil fuels and ressources given by nature. More...

My contacts in Siem Reap Cambodia are currently busy with the Covid pandemic. They are taking care of school children whilst the schools are closed. They do not have the capacity to be part of a collaboration with us right now.