May 17, 2019

Airbnb rents out illegally placed containers, doesn’t check

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:23 am

Airbnb, the rent-out-your-place chain that local politician for housing Laurens Ivens keep saying he’ll teach them a lesson, but constantly fails to do so (in Dutch) (and then goes on Twitter and blames foreigners), always makes the news in a bad way. For starters, people who rent through airbnb are supposed to rent for no more than 30 days, but Ivens has done nothing to make that concrete, and so places end up being rented for a total of 60 days and that now includes sea containers because nobody checks but the tourists being duped.

In Amsterdam, two illegally placed sea containers on the side of the road were casually put up for rent in the Spaarndammerstraat and Pauwenpad, downtown Amsterdam. The containers had some beds on the floor and that’s it. The ridiculous offer was pointed out by Dutch Twitter account Pretpark Amsterdam (Pretpark means amusement park), a group that campaigns against the negative effects of tourism in the city.

“Employees of the municipality of Amsterdam dragged the ‘hotel’ away on Sunday morning. After complaints from local residents, it turned out that the city district had not issued a permit for placing a container.”

According to Statistic Netherlands, the city of Amsterdam has 863.202 residents as of 1st January 2019, and will surpass its highest amount of residents in its history soon enough, if that’s not already the case. Sadly, this means that all kinds of people will try and trick tourists out of money and that Ivens will continue to be shocked about it, sympathise, and proceed to do nothing but talk and blame foreigners like the novice bigots that his socialist party is aspiring to be.

(Link: .tellerreport.com, Photo: containers that students actually live in, in Amsterdam North)

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June 30, 2009

Folding cargo containers save space and energy

Filed under: Design,Dutch first,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 11:59 am
cargoshell1

Rotterdam businessman Rene Giesbers dreamed up, helped design and launched an innovative container concept called Cargoshell, a fully foldable container made from composite that significantly reduces the amount of space empty containers take up on ships and trains. In fact, acccording to the report on Dutch television (RTL 4) yesterday, some 20% of all containers on ships and some 30% of all containers on trucks are just ’empties’ requiring much fuel to transport. According to a Dutch article earlier this year, some 20 billion euro is lost every year just transporting empty containers.

When the Cargoshell is folded, it takes up 25% of its actual size. It can be folded by one person and a forklift in just 30 seconds.

The Dutch often use foldable and obviously re-usable shopping crates, which I had never seen in North America, that look like this:

krat

This crate was what inspired Giesbers to do the same for containers.

Sometimes innovation is really just staring at us in the face.

(Photo: cargoshell.com)

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