February is the time for many people to seek out the sun, both in the far south and in the Alps on the long slats. Strangely enough, for those who have stayed at home, February 2020 is the month in which spring began. Also with us. In the mycoretum, the plants are already in bloom and our neighbor’s bees are buzzing happily looking for water to dissolve the sugars in their combs that they badly need after their ‘hibernation’ (we were told).

Spring has also started well for us. With our partners of ‘World of Paper’ (Wereld van Papier) and the ‘Knowledge Center for Paper and Cardboard’ (Kenniscentrum Papier en Karton), we have received a new assignment in the form of an MIT subsidy. It concerns the project ‘B3TC, Bio Technological Conversion’. Within this project we also work together with Outlander Materials and the brewery Vet and Lazy, both located in Blue City in Rotterdam. Part of the project is that we use residual flows from beer in our Brickz (which we have of course given the working name ‘Beer Brickz’) and with which we are going to grow hops which are again purchased by Vet and Lazy. You don’t get it more circular.

We have already agreed that we will organize a harvest festival again, and this time not only the miscanthus for the Fiber2Fiber project will be harvested, but also the hops for B3TC. And of course we celebrate that with a nice beer. The date for the harvest festival is set on Thursday, October 15 from 2 p.m. The program will be developed in the near future.

In our beautiful mycoretum, we will also regularly organize picnics with relations with the working title ‘Under the grapes’, after the name of camping ‘Unter den Trauben’ on Lake Como, where Tom Bade spent his holidays as a small child in the early 1960s.

For the Fiber2Fiber project, we are entering a second cultivation season in which we will now apply the fungi that break down asbestos in field trials and in which we will conduct tests on a larger scale with the sewage sludge in the phytorefinery to use this as a substrate for the cultivation of biomass.

For our project in Overijssel, NIOO-KNAW will monitor the results of the tests and together with ‘Landscape Overijssel’ (Landschap Overijssel) we will investigate where and how we can replant the trees that we have grown on residual flows from their nature reserves in nature reserves in Overijssel. That is also 100% circular.

The phytorefinery ‘the Growing Place’ (de Groeiplaats) is also expanding itself. Together with the Hendriksen nursery, we are using a large field next to the greenhouses to be used as a cultivation place for native trees. There too, there may eventually be about 20,000 trees, with which Triple E naturally runs completely CO2 positively. 

With the ‘National Tree Day’ (Nationale Boomfeestdag) we are working to see if we can ‘enrich the party’ by adding Brickz in the planting holes and in the meantime we have also contributed to Greenhouse Horticulture Netherlands by improving their annual plan.

We expect that some new projects will sprout in the coming weeks that will continue to flourish our company. You will certainly read more about this in the upcoming newsletters. Furthermore, we have no other choice than to embrace this way too early spring and just make the best of it like all other life.