Basareholmen: the island self-sufficient project

Abstract

Basareholmen is an island close to the city center of Karlskrona. The island has been used for ammunition manufacturing from the early 1800s until 1986. Since then there has not been any activity on the island until Karlskrona municipality focused its attention on it in 2018.

Basareholmen is together with two other islands in the archipelago, part of the Karlskrona Culture Archipelago concept. The islands have different themes, where Basareholmen will be characterized by art, innovation and sustainability.

During the spring of 2018, the municipality and an innovation company fulfilled workshops with local companies, entrepreneurs, students and public organizations. The purpose was in order to find sustainable and innovative solutions to different challenges of Basareholmen, like transportation, clean water, energy, waste management and handling of contaminated soil. The workshops resulted in several ideas of how to solve these challenges.

Some of these solutions were prioritized, one of them being the idea of using plants to measure and clean the contaminated soil. Plants have the availability to absorb pollutants; wish is a highly analogous solution in an increasingly technically oriented society,

The disposal of sewage was another prioritized solution. The suggested solution recommends extracting the sewage and transformed into biogas, which maybe can be used as fuel for transport. There is a vision that this process can be done on the island, thus making the island self-sufficient.

The design of transport system of the island is another challenge. Instead of buying an existing transport system, it was suggested that the transports could be designed for its purpose with the aim of in an open-minded way to find the optimal transport.