Hugo Polman
Sustainable mindset
During an intense working week in Texel it showed again how important cooperation and communication between different aspects in society is. In the beginning it was assumed that the main problem might be to persuade Texelaars to accept future technologies and changes that come with it. A week full of discussions between students with different backgrounds resulted into the conclusion that a critical event has to happen before the Texelaars (or other society groups) are going to accept the changes.
Personally, I think there is more to it. It might be true that most of the sustainable directions for society are nowadays a bit less profitable for society than non-sustainable solutions. But the difference is in offering opportunities and new design areas by creating value chains that haven’t existed until know. Therefore, there should be more a mind-set toward taking action instead of waiting for society to change its mind-set. The world needs therefore more initiators by exploring these new design areas and create a greater focus on combining profit with sustainability goals.
In my opinion, most of the sustainability engineers are a bit of dreamers, which is a very good quality to come up with innovative ideas. But many lack the business mind-set which drives the current world and business ventures. Therefore, I think that sustainability engineers should learn more to integrate the corporate mind-set into their thinking strategies. We don’t live in a perfect world yet, where only the ideas are implemented that contribute to the People, Planet, Profit areas. Corporations and even governments are not in that kind of stage yet where sustainability has the highest influence.
Currently I’m exploring how I can combine the purpose of profit with sustainability. At the moment I think the key might be in reassigning materials and services for new purposes. The aim is to apply this knowledge in Base of Pyramid countries where the change for sustainability is needed the most. Texel did learn me how society is a complex structure with many socio-technological aspects. This knowledge will I certainly apply in future projects to come.
