Entrepreneurial environmentalists more than welcome in the Netherlands

If you’re an environmental activist with entrepreneurial ideas on saving the planet, the Netherlands is the place to make your dreams come true.

Already famous in the expat world for its positive approach to new entrepreneurial ideas and start-ups, the Netherlands is the perfect place for expats interested in new ways to help the environment. Government and private initiatives are already counted in the hundreds, with many working on ways to combat plastics pollution and food waste. Environmental consciousness comes naturally to the Dutch as they’ve lived with the ever-encroaching sea for generation on generation, and the modern-day threat of sea level rises due to global warming is very close to home.

Founded in Amsterdam in 2011, Plastic Whale is the planet’s first professional plastics fishing company. Put simply, the company builds boats from plastic waste, possibly the most novel use ever of the discarded plastic bottles fished out from the city’s many canals and its harbour. The first boat was constructed from 10,000 bottles, and the company has made nine more boats since then. Plastic Whale’s mission is simple – to rid the world of plastics pollution and create useful items from the waste. Their eventual goal is to go out of business as there’s no more plastic in the oceans.

Statistics showing 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted every year were the inspiration for Instock, who rescue dumped food and turn it into tasty meals. It’s a small but innovative scheme involving collecting unsold foodstuffs from supermarkets and using them to create dishes on the menus of their three restaurants. Their own cookbook passes on their culinary secrets to home chefs and they also make beer and granola. To date, some 400,000 kilos of unwanted food have been turned into delicious meals.

Air pollution in the Netherlands’ three largest cities isn’t anywhere near as life-threatening as in China, but it’s still there. The idea for Wilde Wand’s mobile room divider uses plants to clean the air in offices by providing a wall of greenery with an integrated watering facility. By taking in carbon dioxide and replacing it with oxygen, the plants stimulate productivity and creativity as well as reducing headaches, stress and curbing tiredness. These ideas and more like them from expat start-ups are marking the Netherlands as the perfect destination for expats with unconventional ideas and a determination to help save the environment from further damage.