Ditch your car for free beer

Bologna entices visitors and residents with green incentives

ROME: In the city of Bologna, locals and visitors can trade in acts of green kindness for a free pint of beer, gelato or night at the movies.

It’s a green scheme aimed at incentivising people to ditch their cars and walk, cycle or take public transit instead.

Set up by urban planner Marco Amadori last year, the programme is powered by the app BetterPoints, which allows users to log their sustainable journeys and earn points, reported BBC News.

The GPS tracker makes sure that people can’t cheat.

In exchange for helping the environment, users can redeem their points at partner shops, restaurants and cafes for things like free beer, ice cream or cinema tickets.

More than 100 local businesses had signed up for the programme.

Dubbed Bella Mossa which means “good job” in Italian, the programme was funded by the EU and the city of Bologna. Bella Mossa runs from April to September.

Users earn points based on the number of trips taken – the maximum is four a day – not the distance travelled.

To earn a free ice cream, for instance, requires earning 3,000 points, or about eight single journeys.

Last year, the programme registered the equivalent of 3.7 million kilometres of sustainable journeys and a total of 16,000 reward vouch- ers was claimed.

Meanwhile, millions of people with high blood sugar may be at greater risk of tuberculosis than previously thought.

Tuberculosis, a severe infection caused by bacteria in the lungs, kills almost as many people each year as HIV/AIDS and malaria combined.

In 2017, nearly 10 million people developed TB, according to the World Health Organisation, and experts are concerned that a global explosion in diabetes will put millions more at risk.

New research unveiled this week at a global lung health conference in The Hague also suggests further cause for worry.

For the study, scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine conducted blood tests on people living with tuberculosis and diabetes in South Africa, Romania, Indonesia and Peru.

They then tested people with TB and high blood sugar levels, but below the threshold for diabetes.

They found that blood samples from those who did not have diabetes still contained molecules associated with people suffering from TB/ diabetes.

“This tells us even before a person develops diabetes, the risk of developing TB is higher,” said Ajay Kumar, a research director at The International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, who was not involved in the study.