Offloading Hamburg Harbor – Jörg Nitzsche
Offloading Hamburg Harbor – from blogsupporter Jörg Nitzsche
Jörg Nitzsche is a northern German photographer who loves the city Hamburg and its harbor. On his website http://www.joergnitzsche.de/en/cocoa.html he presents information and photos about the harbor of the Hanseatic City. Of course, he took the opportunity to capture the AVONTUUR Offloading Event in May 2018. Thank you, Jörg, for supporting our blog with your impressions of that wonderful day.
By Jörg Nitzsche
We are in the 21st century. All of Hamburg is overshadowed by this trend. All of Hamburg? No! An initiative populated by indomitable people does not stop this activity To resist. And they take a lot of effort to deliberately resist this progress madness. For example, the climate-friendly ship transport company TIMBERCOAST, which campaigns for alternative goods traffic. “With wind instead of heavy oil” is your motto and you demonstrate with their sailing freighter “AVONTUUR” that it is possible to transport products also clean over the seas. So far, little has been done to reduce CO2 emissions in shipping, with about 90% of world trade done by sea.
Like almost everything, coffee is transported on huge container ships today, but they want to propagate emissions-free against this development. It has been over 30 years since cargo was finally unloaded by hand at Bremer Kai (Schuppen 50 and Hafenmuseum). With 30 t of loaded cargo and just under two months’ journey, the Avontuur arrived at this historic loading bay on 14 May 2018. Of these, 10 tons are cardomom for “Yogi Tea”, 18 tons of organically grown and fair trade coffee beans for “El Rojito” and 1.5 tonnes of cocoa beans for the Austrian chocolate manufacturer “Zotter” traditionally removed manually by many volunteers by hand.
It went on sustainable, cargo bikes from tricargo, Ahoi Velo Cargo Bikes and El Rojito can load up to 300 kilos, so that the coffee and cocoa beans were transported on land environmentally friendly to the interim storage. Timbercoast will continue to do so in the future. It would be desirable if this traditional goods movement had a future and so also more sailing vessels are put into operation.
For 15 years, El Rojito has been transporting his coffee exclusively with cargo bikes through our city. For this environmental friendliness the Hamburg club El Rojito was honored by environment senator Jens Kerstan at the AVONTUUR as Hamburg’s new environmental partner. When everyone pulls together, something big can happen. This event has also put former harbor workers, who are very committed to the harbor museum, in a state of wonderment.