RECYCLING PRESERVES NATURE

In Denmark the consumers pay a deposit when they buy beverages in bottles and cans. When they return these they get the deposit back in cash. Mette Krogh Steffensen, a 48-year-old nurse from Copenhagen, has just delivered her empty bottle back to the supermarket and uses the refund to buy some food on her way home.

"Today I bought some organic milk and vegetables for the refund I just got. I always buy organic food because I want to save the environment for my children and grandchildren," she said, adding that even if the organic food is a bit more expensive she gladly spent a bit more on doing the right thing, rather than buying cheaper goods that might pollute the nature when it is produced.

And actually the Danish recycling system is greatly contributing to preserve the nature and the environment as most papers, bottles and cans are returned instead of being thrown away anywhere.

Inge Fisker, manager for marketing and communication in Dansk Retursystem who handles the returned bottles and cans, told Xinhua "The core of the recycling system is definitely to take care of the very valuable and useful resources and to make the environment cleaner and better."

She said 89 percent of all bottles and cans sold on the Danish market are returned to Dansk Retursystem. Around three million items are delivered every day to the two factories that Dansk Retursystem is running and processed into new materials.

ENJOY EASY BIKING IN COPENHAGEN

Copenhagen has often been named to bicycle capital of the world. And actually this is a result of a deliberate strategy from the Copenhagen municipality.

"We want to be a green capital. We have a goal for 2025 that we want to be the first carbon neutral capital in the world. And one of the factors in our overall plan is how we are transporting ourselves," Mayor for the technical and environmental administration of Copenhagen, Ayfer Baykal, told Xinhua.

Lately a new super bicycle highway was inaugurated in April 2012 and 26 more bicycle highways are on the planning board in the Copenhagen Region together with some 20 other municipalities. In Copenhagen alone there are more bikes than inhabitants -- around 600,000 bikes and 550,000 citizens.

Authoritative calculations show that the Danish society earns money every time somebody uses a bike instead of a car. That is money saved on health expenditure, less money spent on people that has to be treated at hospitals because of car accidents, and less money spent on the environment because of the generally improved natural and health conditions when people bike.

These figures will most likely improve as more bicycle highways will be established in the coming years.

"The idea behind these new bicycle highways, is to take the thinking behind the car culture where you have suburbs and direct traffic links -- roads and highways into the city center where you could go to work -- and transfer that to the conditions for people who use their bikes instead of their cars," said Frits Bredal from the Danish Cyclist Federation.

"The Danish Cyclist Federation organizes the 'Bike to Work' campaign every year where company leaders and their employees bike to work and every day register on the Internet which days they have biked to work. The competition is about how many days you have biked to work -- not how fast you bike to work."

The well-known Danish company Novozymes is among those companies who have taken up the challenge and even in the wintertime with snow on the streets and temperatures below zero. Many of such companies' employees take the bike every morning from their homes to the office.

"The kind of company we are and the kind of products we develop are all founded on the basis of sustainability and this call also for that we in our personal lives make the right choices, and of course taking the bike to work is better for the environment than taking the car," said Lars Hansen, regional president for Europe in Novozymes, before going home by bike from his office.

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