“Scattered” and integrated Sustainability? What’s the Future?

In my last blog post, I mentioned phenomena such as “‘Klima’ everywhere” and ubiquitous Pfandstation. I will call them integrated sustainability, meaning that these approaches and concepts are broadly recognized and applied; however, I also realized there are a lot of “scattered” sustainability that we’ve seen through this week. Thus, Germany now seems more like a combination of integrated and scattered sustainability.

The cheese farm formed a whole circle starting from growing hays; the green industry intentionally has multiple types of plants in order to protect the ecosystem; the passive houses even form positive net energy use. The fascinating townhall uses concrete and triple-layered window to adjust the room temperature…However, these places seem quite local and not ubiquitous. What if more office buildings could apply solar panels as many as the townhall? What if more farms could be managed and ran like the one we went to? What if more than 50% of residential areas could achieve positive net energy consumption? Would Germany become even more sustainable than it is now? Of course, every effort counts. The existing ones definitely will help with the sustainable development, but I’m just thinking about the future of expanding these benefits to the entire country.

On the other hand, this might be also related to the difficulty of expansion because of various obstacles of start-up entrepreneurship in Germany, which I will talk about during our final project.