Food for Everyone!

I now want to touch on another facet of the Royal Seaport that amazed me. As mentioned in my previous blog post a large part of the sustainable urban program strategy is accessibility. At the Royal Seaport they wanted to make food more readily available, by making it a law that everyone cannot be more than a five minute walk from their residential area to a grocery store. This is great because not only is it accessible, but it allows people to cut back on overall food waste, by buying food in smaller increments. A large issue in the U.S. is that we buy groceries and produce in such bulk in places such as BJs, Costco or Sam's Club, that there isn't a way to finish it before it all goes bad. As my role as a food scientist, I thought this was so interesting. I feel that in the U.S. we always think as food as "bigger the better." I wonder how different the food climate would be in the U.S. if we adopted smaller portions at grocery stores. To learn more about your own food waste follow the instructions on this website: https://www.itsfresh.com/food-waste-calculator/ . This website is a great resource and will even tell you how much money you are wasting monthly. It will also tell you your CO2 emissions. In addiction to these food initiatives, the Royal Seaport has some other amazing stats/ facts:

• They will be fossil fuel free by 2030.

• They have restricted parking, car sharing services, and 20% of cars are electrical cars.

• The Royal Seaport is the largest developed area in Sweden, with 12,000 + residential units and 35,000 new working spaces.

The housing in the seaport was also very innovative in ways to save on heat and other costs. Some of the buildings did not attach the balcony to the walls of the building to ensure that the coolness of the outside wouldn't affect their home.