Pave the way Contest to remove tiles and restore greenery

National competition aims to help the Netherlands reach environmental targets by removing garden flagstones

- Senay Boztas

Tineke Menalda sits in the sun on her front step, nursing a cup of coffee and idly plucking out the odd weed. Three years ago, the front of her terrace house in Amersfoort was completely paved. But now, sitting in a lush garden of trees and green, she is an official ambassador for the strangest new sport in the Netherlands: tegelwippen, "tile whipping", or "whipping away" the paving stones.

"A lot of people think that tiles are easier, but actually when you have larger trees, you get very few weeds underneath them and you can make it really easy," she said. "When I had paving I would never sit here, but now it's a garden, it's cooler in summer and in the spring, it's lovely."

In March, the starting gun fired for the NK Tegelwippen, a lighthearted competition where, up to October, municipalities compete to get rid of the most paved infrastructure. The "tile table" is dominated by Venlo in Limburg (14,636 whipped away, 144 per 1,000 residents), with Menalda's Amersfoort third (3,271) and the Dutch capital Amsterdam trailing with just 2.