The City of Vantaa is already living the future. In implementing its green environmental program, the city has found operating methods supporting sustainable development such as indoor food production and urban agriculture.
Where can you grow potatoes sprouting in the air, hops vegetating without mud or oyster mushrooms deriving their nutrients from coffee grounds? The correct answer is in Vantaa, more specifically, in Metropolia University of Applied Sciences’ laboratory in Myyrmäki. The farm is called UrbanFarmLab, and it is specialized in indoor food production and food innovations.
For mayor Ritva Viljanen, the laboratory concretely shows where Vantaa’s resource-smart roadmap is taking the city’s food production, which is, to urban food production, local food production, and deepening business partnering on the field. The city has several environmental and circular-economy projects involving different fields. In addition to urban food production, real property, circular economy and airfreight clusters are used to attain sustainable living.
“Vantaa is building a sustainable future with the help of its strategic environmental program that directs the city’s development into an emission-free and waste-free city that uses its natural resources in a sustainable way. Our resource-smart roadmap has three goals: no emissions, no waste, no excess consumption. All this, combined with our greatest goal, carbon-neutral Vantaa, will be reality in 2030,” Viljanen says.
Urban food production
Food cluster partnering with the city consists of almost 50 businesses, including start-ups, restaurants, and food producers, the biggest of the latter consist of, among others, Valio, Fazer, and HKScan. The aim of this cooperation is to make Vantaa into the capital of urban food production by 2025.
Read more at Business Vantaa