Of banana peels and popcorn

By: Viva Kermani

About two weeks ago, I met Peo and Satoko Ekberg.

Peo is from Sweden - a country that is fueling ahead to be the world's first oil-free country by 2020.This is without increasing its nuclear energy capabilities.I would call this ambition, to a point of being far fetched.,but Sweden seems to be on its way. From 70% energy from oil in 1975, today only 30% of its energy comes from oil.

So are the 9 million Swedes committed to this idea. Is it really possible to break the oil dependency and still run a first world country efficiently? From what Peo tells me, yes.

 Buses run on banana peels and kitchen waste, elevators are solar powered, taxis ferry you on coffee wastes collected from coffee shops. The capital, Stockholm, has reduced its household wastes by 97% - a big part of the garbage is  recycled into energy to power homes and transport. Public  transport in Stockholm now runs  a 100 % on bio-energy. The list goes on.

So I asked Peo, what does the city smell like with all this garbage in buses, taxis and cars?  Oh ! Fresh pop corn.

So next time you get a whiff of fresh pop corn, remind yourself that you may not be  in a cinema house watching  “An Inconvenient Truth”  but you are probably in Sweden, on a bus, going to  watch Bergman’s “Autumn Sonata”