Sustainable Oots Oots

I have considered myself an environmentalist for quite sometime now but there are two environmental bombs I have never even tried doing away with - air travel and clubbing. I was shocked to learn that a nightclub uses 150 times the energy of an average household. Does that mean that everything I try to thrift gets cancelled out by my outing habit? Yes, I felt guilty but what was there that I could really do about it?

It turns out that there is an entire movement geared at solving this problem, excluding the guilt campaign that per se the anti-smoking movement has. It is innovative, green and often awfully geeky but sometimes surprisingly chic - it's Sustainable Clubbing.

The somewhat recently developed sustainable dance floor, which generates energy from dancing feet pounding on it, is becoming outdated as new less conventional methods are coming into practice, primarily in Rotterdam, the green clubbing capital, but also in less suspected places like the US.

Recycled mismatch furniture, deco and even entire abandoned spaces are some of the easiest ways for a club to pride itself as a conscious enterprise. A club in Los Angeles garnished its front with an energy generating bicycle with employees taking turns in spinning the pedals - definitely a way to draw attention. Other methods are less visible however. Serving other people's left overs is what some of these clubs are doing as a way to recycle food and drinks and small architectural tricks are being used to sustain more sound using less energy. While rainwater is already commonly used to flush toilets, another idea being developed as you read this is to collect people's sweat from dancing as well. One Dutch Club even served urine purified into drinking water at its opening night!

Some of these methods might remind you way too much of the goofy science geek from your high school for you to imagine yourself dancing and flirting the night away in such an ambient. To me, coming from Belgrade where we have not even mastered recycling yet, it seems too cool to be true. Rotterdam is definitely going to be on my itinerary next time I go to the Netherlands.