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What do a mathematician and an architect get up to together? In the case of Ricardo Reis and Nuno Lopes, they have created a route calculator for public transport routes in Portugal. They include all vehicles in it and offer people the possibility of coordinating timetables in order to reduce waiting times. Formed following a competition by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, with the aim of solving social problems in Portugal, the company Mais Perto set up the project TransportesPúblicos.PT. Here, you can find different means of transport – road, rail or river –including tourist lifts and urban buses. You can …

In 1990, in the city of New York, the heart of capitalism, a group of people came together for one purpose: to ask God to inspire something that would make it possible for the “walls of consumerism” to collapse. These people felt that there was an urgent need to humanise the economy in a decisive manner. The previous year, the Berlin wall, the symbol of communism, had been demolished, and capitalism was able to appear, in the eyes of many, as the triumphant system. And that’s what it was. Its development, through globalisation and the expansion of financial capitalism, increasingly …

ECO123 spoke to the inventor of a completely new method of producing recycled paper, the biologist Dr. Philipp Althöfer (47). He studied natural sciences at the universities of Düsseldorf, Bonn and Cologne. The topic for his diploma thesis was: Biotechnical treatment of process-water using the example of a paper factory processing scrap paper in a large city. And his 2001 doctoral thesis: Softening and re-use of biologically treated circulation water from paper manufacture. Althöfer is a lecturer at the University of Cologne, teaching the course “Biological Cleaning of Wastewater”. Just before this edition went to press, Althöfer showed ECO123 the …

Innovation and investment are the spices in our economic soup. You will need the following ingredients: 38,887 daily returns of the tabloid Correio da Manhã, 27,804 copies of the weekly Sábado, 17,824 unsold copies of Expresso, 12,547 copies of Público and 16,118 unsold copies of the Diário de Notícias, 23,339 copies of the daily Jornal de Notícias, 16,050 returns of the sports paper O Jogo, 33,442 unsold copies of Record, 5,625 returns of Vida Económica, 10,574 copies of Visão – a total of over 250,000 copies of all daily papers and magazines in Portugal per day: A Bola, Caras, Cosmopolitan, …

Styropor (Styrofoam) was invented by Fritz Rudolf Stastny. He was born in the Czech city of Brno on 4th March 1908 and died on 25th May 1985 in Ludwigshafen in Germany. It was more by chance than anything else that he invented this material, which nowadays plagues us right down to the foundations of our houses and presumably on to the hazardous waste sites. He studied at the Technical High School in Brno and completed his studies of chemistry and chemical technologies in 1930 as a qualified chemist and engineer. In 1939, Fritz Stastny moved from the Semperit Rubber Company …

UmCoche is a project devoted to lifts in and between 11 cities in Portugal – Vila Real, Braga, Porto, Covilhã, Aveiro, Viseu, Coimbra, Leiria, Lisbon, Évora and Faro. A few months ago, the idea was still in its infancy. For it to be implemented, 1,500 euros had to be raised through crowdfunding, which is exactly what was done. Now it’s all happening. In June, a beta version of the site was launched, with 110 routes defined. At that time, the users of the facebook lifts group (with over 7,000 members) had priority in trying it out. Now it’s available for …

The idea behind Nutrally is to make sweets that are as nutritional as possible. Its founders, Filipa Rocha and Silvino Henriques, fulfilled their dream when the raised 5,000€ through the crowdfunding system, together with private investment. Since January, they have been selling sweets which contain no sugar or animal gelatine but do contain natural antioxidants, colorants and vitamins. There are ten outlets for their products – in Faro, Braga, Aveiro, Matosinhos, Gaia, Valongo, Funchal, Guimarães, Gondomar and Bragança – but Filipa and Silvino are aiming to increase this number and are currently negotiating with retail chains. In the short term …

“0% animal, 100% organic, 0% GM* and 100% vegetable” – this is the motto of Naturalmente, a new company producing home-made pies and bread. Ana Brazuna, with a degree in nutrition sciences, is the only person in the company, which currently produces for 11 different shops in the Lisbon area. She focuses on producing gluten-free bread based on whole-grain rice, which can contain apple, pumpkin or miso, and pies with seaweed and vegetables, tofu, seitan and tempeh. She says that she decided to “take a risk in a market where there are few products but increasing demand”. And although she …

FF Solar Lda. from Aljezur, which has been based in southwest Portugal since 1989, has won the Energy Globe National Award 2013 for its product Home Kit Solution For African Countries (Angola). The annual prize is awarded to initiatives and projects in 160 countries which devote their efforts to energy efficiency, renewable energies and resource conservation. Every prize-winning project sends a message of hope and inspiration out into the world and points the way towards a sustainable future, says Maneka Gandhi, the Indian chair of the environmental initiative. The FF Solar Lda. kit, which is supplied to Angola among other …

Portugal is a country of customs, many of them healthy and nice, but it seems increasingly distant from itself. The country is abandoning a number of traditions to the realms of memory, and it is gradually being occupied by new habits which are based purely on consumption. But there is one shop filled with traditional Portuguese products which is still resisting such change: A Vida Portuguesa. The result of research into old Portuguese products by the journalist Catarina Portas, in 2004 the brand Uma Casa Portuguesa appeared, but it only sold hampers. They opened their first shop in 2007 named …