The youth program Higher Geography from the Scottish BBC produce an extensive program about urban environment issues in Europe. For the program a crew form the Scottish BBC also travels to the Netherlands to report about urbanisation, air pollution and waste management.
The Netherlands is used as a case study because it has problems associated with urban sprawl due to high population density. It also has been extremely pro-active with respect to air pollution and waste management. It comes out that the very densely populated west of The Netherlands has many environmental problems, but also solutions.
The BBC crew films at the Vogelmeerpolder a the largest contaminated site in the Netherlands, according to the Environment and Building Control Department of the municipality of Amsterdam. In the 1960s, several chemical companies dumped tens of thousands of barrels of poison with the permission of Amsterdam officials. Because the site is too large for soil remediation, the Ministry of special planning decided to cover the former dump with foil and apply soil from elsewhere on top of it.
Also filming and interviews take place at an modern incineration plant on the side of Amsterdam, where around 500 trucks deliver various waste streams every day. Some of the waste goes to the post-separation plant, where as much raw material as possible is recovered for reuse. The waste that remain goes to the incinerators, where it is used as fuel to generate energy with the highest possible efficiency. That energy is used to heat homes and businesses and some is converted into electricity.
Also as many raw materials as possible are recovered from the flue gases and bottom ashes.
Also a farmers family is interviewed about the closure and demolition of their farm to make place for a new housing district, a professor from the technical University Delft is interviewed about urban sprawl and a Alexander de Ro, member of the European parliament for the Green Left party is interviewed about the Dutch environmental Issues.
For the filming in the Netherlands for this program Featurez gave advice, did the research, set-up and planning, accompanied the filming, did some of the interviews and translations.