9. Arrival on Texel

With the previous eight chapters as preparation, the team left for the project week on Texel. In this week we visited many companies on Texel (the Teso, Texelse Paddestoelenkwekerij, NIOZ and more) spoke to many local people and collected new information. All this gave us new insights and required adjustments of the design we proposed earlier. We discovered that it is very difficult for people from outside to give advice on how waste streams have to be connected to each since we don’t know the exact streams. Besides, we don’t know exactly the needs and desired of the actors on Texel. Also, we are not able to map all potential actors on the island. For example: when we visited Maarten Dijker of the Texelse Paddestoelenkwekerij, we discovered that his existing products streams are already quite sustainable (he uses woodwaste). Our proposal (use coffee waste) was not a good option for him since the demand of his customers is very fluctuating due to the tourism industry. Since wood requires shorter preparation time than coffee waste, the coffee waste is not flexible enough for the small business of Maarten.  

The week gave us the insight that we cannot tell the local people how to change their streams or techniques with a top-down appraoch, but we identify barriers in their growth process and give ideas to overcome these barriers. In this case, the solution seemed to help them to connect to each other. Currently, it was not transparent where waste is for sale (and companies sometimes do not know that their waste is valuable for others) and this can be improved according us.

The chapter materials and waste in the book describes the new proposal of the sub-system Material & Waste  is presented. In the overall Jutter 2030 proposal, we have suggested the improvements to the website 'De Uitdaging' which is described in our chapter in the book. The general idea follows from the aforementioned; we want to stimulate the blue economy way of thinking in Texel by making the valuable waste streams on Texel more visible. We trust on the Texelaars to be innovative enough to create new opportunities with this information.