Amsterdam’s Cycle Lanes: A Model for Horticulture Sustainability

The creation of Amsterdam’s network of cycle lanes is arguably a reminder of what can be achieved through cooperation, planning, and organisation – something that the horticulture sector can draw inspiration from as it reduces its carbon footprint, writes Rachel Anderson

As a mum of a 12-year-old who loves cycling, my heart nervously skips a beat every time he goes out on his bike. I can’t help but worry about all of vehicles and impatient drivers whizzing around the busy roads in London where we live. Whilst there are a couple of cycle lanes here and there, there’s arguably much more that could be done to make the city a safer place to cycle.

And so it was, during my visit to the GreenTech Amsterdam horticulture trade show in June, that I found myself marvelling at the city’s elaborate network of cycle lanes – which were a joy for a worrying mum like me to behold. What I didn’t realise until I Googled the history of the city’s cycling network is that it was largely built in the 1970s after campaigners voiced their road safety concerns to the Dutch government. The government listened to them and then worked with the campaigners, residents, urban planners and the like to help make the city – and, in fact, the whole country – cycle friendly.

Happily, some of the sustainability talks at GreenTech also reminded me of how this kind of coordinated approach is successfully helping the European horticulture sector operate more sustainably.

One such example is a public-private partnership project in the Netherlands named the De Groene Tulp (The Green Tulip), which is seeing growers, scientists and researchers work together to develop sustainable cultivation systems for the outdoor cultivation of tulips.

In fact, Michel Jansen, programme manager for Vertify – the agricultural research centre coordinating the project, noted that the key to creating “a zero-impact, but bright and healthy, future for tulips” is to “collaborate, experiment, innovate, and also communicate and work together.”

He added: “I think one of the successes of The Green Tulip is that we’ve created an ecosystem of universities, colleges, and research institutes [that are] working together with farmers in order to produce the best tulips for the future.”

So far, the project has found that cover crops (planted by a harvester during the tulip harvest) can improve yields and reduce disease. “You can gain from the microbiological activity that you are stimulating by growing another crop on top of your flowers,” said Michel.

New bulb treatments, such as foam coatings, have also proven to be effective in the trials and more environmentally friendly than the traditional immersion method.

The project is also seeing a swarm of 80 robots being driven through the flower fields as a team of researchers busily gather the data collected by the robots – which were originally made to detect crop viruses – to develop a new decision support system for the fungal disease botrytis.

Another example of good cooperation is the sustainability initiative of Bloom & Wild – a Certified B Corporation famous for its “letterbox” cut-flower bouquets. Sibbe Krol, Bloom & Wild’s head of sustainability, revealed that the firm actively engages with sustainability experts, NGOs, and customers to better understand what sustainability means to them.

Sibbe said: “We have all of our directors thinking: ‘How can we operate as a company as sustainably as possible? And how do we make sure that we strike the right balance between the impact we have on the environment and the people that we work with – and, of course, still have healthy finances as a company?”

He added: “It [sustainability] also fits with our vision, and we want to be the destination for making life more beautiful and thoughtful. And we think that we cannot really live that value if we don’t also think about all of the impacts and implications that our day-to-day decisions have all the way throughout our supply chain and in all the communities that we work with.”

As part of its aim to become net zero by 2045, Bloom & Wild assigns a sustainability “score” to each of its inputs across the supply chains, including the bouquet’s packaging, transportation, the type of flowers sourced, and how they are grown. In fact, the company has actually developed a bouquet management system in which it has data stored on every single flower that it buys. This includes, for example, the flower growers’ use in the greenhouse of water, fertilizers, CO₂, growing media, plant protection products, and plastics.

Fortuitously, this system has, said Sibbe, led to many unexpected benefits: “It’s not just about the right thing to do. It’s an intrinsic motivation we have but I think we’ve also found throughout our sustainability journey that there are lots and lots of reasons to actually focus on sustainability – and particularly climate – in that we’ve seen that it’s helped us improve a lot of our operations and saved us costs and helped futureproof our business.”

Clearly, the road to sustainability has many positive results – and is arguably best travelled in collaboration with others … and perhaps on a bike in the cycle lane.