There are no crocodiles in the Franconian Forest, but that is pure coincidence.
Because by pure coincidence, the glass manufacturer Carl-August Heinz traveled to Cornwall in 2007, visited the famous botanical garden "Eden Project" there and, contrary to the majority opinion of his fellow regulars, decided not to build a crocodile farm for handbag production, but a tropical greenhouse next to his factory in Kleintettau erect
The brothers had racked their brains over and over again about how to make sensible use of the vast amounts of waste heat that is generated during glass production and that has to be cooled at great expense - until the manufacturer had the brilliant idea of opening a branch in the equatorial latitudes in the deepest Franconian hinterland and to provide a blueprint for how Germany can carry out many of its climate,
Jakob Strobel and Serra
deputy head of the feature section.
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In 2014, the Klein Eden Tropenhaus am Rennsteig – as it is officially called – ceremonially opened and was then persistently derided as a spinning mill.
But then a Swedish girl radically changed the climate debate, and now well over ten thousand people come to the Franconian Forest every year to learn how the planet could be saved.
In the greenhouse for visitors, they get to know exotic plants such as tamarind, vanilla, allspice or jackfruit and tropical dwellers such as praying mantises, neck spines, corn snakes or poison dart frogs, while on display boards they learn that the Amazon stores 120 billion tons of carbon dioxide and that Germany uses more paper than any other country Africa and South America together.
The idea behind the tropical house is as simple as it is plausible: In the Franconian Forest, the cultivation of fruits and spices is being researched and perfected on an area of almost three thousand square meters, which otherwise come to Germany as air freight with a devastating carbon dioxide balance.
The focus is on papaya and star fruit, while yuzu, guavas, kaffir limes, kumquats, blood oranges, citron, ginger, galangal and allspice are also cultivated.
For this you need a constant temperature between 21 and 30 degrees, which is provided by 38 to 48 degrees hot water, heated by the free waste heat from the glass factory.
"If I wanted to do that with oil, I would need 120,000 liters per year," says Ralf Schmitt, head of the Tropenhaus, who is not only a trained master gardener and business administration graduate, but also one of 117 spice sommeliers in Germany and one more another calculation: it needs 1.2 megawatts of waste heat annually, one eighteenth of what is produced by an average server farm.
With every single farm, of which there are thousands upon thousands in Germany, you could manage two hectares of greenhouse space and much more with the waste heat from all the car or chemical factories.
"Why aren't there tropical houses on their roofs,