Project Websites

The Green Beach project aims to protect the natural environment of Dutch beaches and finding ecological solutions to clean the beaches and deal with waste and sea wrack. The project client is Stichting ANEMOON, a conservation group that encourages private companies and local governments to implement nature-based solutions to environmental issues.

Sea wrack is the organic material that washes up on beaches. When beaches are cleaned, the wrack and other litter is often cleared away with the use of mechanical methods such as tractors. This harms the natural beach ecosystem and rids the beach of the wrack which is used as a habitat by different species, including sandhoppers. Without the sandhoppers, the nutrients from the wrack are not properly absorbed into the sand, which can lead to erosion and a reduction of biodiversity, as well as negatively impacting dune development. This increased erosion and less developed dunes put coastal communities at risk of flooding and extreme weather events.

To help ANEMOON combat this issue and help them achieve their goals, we created a tool to help municipalities find an optimal cleaning strategy in the form of the decision tree. This tool is designed to determine the result on the basis of locational factors and taking into account people, planet and profit. This allows the output to be tailored to individual cases, reflecting the fact that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. This was then supported by a multiple-criterial analysis. To determine some of these factors we researched “people” aspects through the creation of a 185-participant survey used to measure public opinion on their tourism preferences, environmental knowledge and awareness of the issue.

Through the results of our project we hope to streamline the process of implementing more sustainable tailor-made beach cleaning solutions and help the conservation efforts made to protect the natural coastal environment of the Netherlands.

The highway connecting Almere, Schiphol, and Amsterdam was expanded by the SAAone consortium in 2017, and Hochtief PPP solutions is responsible for maintaining this 20 km junction until 2042. We were tasked with finding different ways to make the maintenance of this junction more sustainable, since the production and use of asphalt is a high emitter of carbon dioxide and non-carbon pollutants. While the way we design roads currently is accepted, the fossil based compounds required for asphalt production are not sustainable in the long run, and their future usage is uncertain. Fossil fuels might not have a place in society in 20 years, or could be heavily taxed by the government, which would deter companies from utilising them at all. Furthermore, while it is possible we will successfully mitigate climate change over the next couple decades, it is highly likely that countries in Europe and across the world will continue to experience unpredictable weather conditions, and it is important we design roads that are capable of withstanding these conditions. This is why it is of utmost importance that Hochtief and companies like it design roads with asphalt that reduces the dependency on fossil fuels, while taking into account the uncertainty climate change poses. Our project aims to tackle these issues through providing new insights into greener technologies and determining how they might hold up in multiple scenarios that climate change could pose.

De Suikerzijde will be a new neighborhood in the western part of the city of Groningen on the site of the previous sugar factory. As of 2024, the Phase 1 of the redevelopment will be underway with over 700 homes along with various amenities already planned. The municipality’s goals for this redevelopment involves creating a neighborhood that is climate adapted and that has a high level of social cohesion. Additionally, it is meant to attract a wide variety of people, varying in both age and income to create a dynamic community. The main research question for our group was; “How can an active community be incorporated into a climate-adaptive neighborhood?” which was formulated to analyze the current plan and look into how it could be improved in regards to climate adaptation and social cohesion.

This report uses analytics and case studies to recommend interventions that could be applied to the current project phase. Through the use of scenarios we came up with ideas and suggestions for municipality, which we formulated in our final advice. We hope that these interventions help De Suikerzijde become an example for sustainable neighborhoods in the future.

For an overview of our paper, you can visit our website. The webpage acts as an executive summary of the report, where it displays visuals of developed scenarios and a final advice.

As cities and consumerism continue to grow, so does the amount of waste produced; the limited space in cities makes sustainable waste separation difficult for both residents and waste-gathering companies (Sanne, 2019). To tackle this problem at its roots, the municipality of Groningen has the ambition to be completely waste-free by 2030, transitioning from a linear economy to a circular one. This endeavour will require closing the loop of waste streams into a cycle and making the best use of raw materials. As a starting point to achieve its goals, the municipality plans to design all newly built neighbourhoods in Groningen to be circular starting from conception, ensuring that all construction, energy, water, and residential waste will be reduced, reused or recycled. However, not all neighbourhoods are built the same: they can differ vastly in size, space, and population. Thus, a vision for local circularity with guidelines and criteria that the municipality can apply to all new neighbourhoods in Groningen must be formulated first. That is where we come into play. In this project, we will collaborate with the Waste and Circularity department of the Municipality of Groningen, aiming to develop a vision for circular neighbourhoods by exploring the currently available state-of-the-art solutions for the most critical aspects relative to waste and circularity, utilising multi-criteria analyses (MCAs) to identify the most promising ones with regards to the Nested Triple Bottom Line framework, contextualised into the local and national requirements. The best solutions will then be combined to formulate varied scenarios of circularity, the best among which will be identified with our MCA approach and proposed to the municipality as a vision for new circular neighbourhoods in Groningen.

Implementing sustainability aspects into an organization’s business model becomes more important nowadays. To transition businesses to a higher level of sustainability, a lot of capital needs to be invested in order to implement sustainable innovations. However, businesses may be reluctant to invest money into sustainability because they might for example aim for the highest profit of their company. Sustainability is not only restricted to technological, economical and political innovations, but social innovations to create social sustainability are also of importance. This project is in collaboration with the social organization United Kitchen. United Kitchen was founded as an initiative to enhance the integration of people with a migrant background in the Dutch society. This is achieved by organizing dinner events during which migrants can share traditional dishes from their country of origin with local inhabitants to create a cultural exchange. In this project, United Kitchen is used as a case study to investigate on what aspects businesses can increase sustainability within their current or developing business model. Although the awareness of the importance of sustainability in organizations is rising there are still organizations that are not aware of the importance or don’t have the knowledge and tools to cope with the problem. Even if there might be awareness, acting accordingly might still be hard. Not taking sustainability into account will not only have a negative effect on the business in the long term, but also on the environment. The unsustainable use of the environment will eventually have an even larger impact on a larger scale. Therefore, to create long term success it is crucial for organizations to change towards more sustainable business models. The aim of this project is to provide an usable guideline for business to improve sustainability within their organization on social, economic and environmental aspects.

Sustainable value based entrepreneurship (SVBE) (unofficially called degrowth by the team itself) is a project where the goal is to create guidelines on how small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) in Drenthe can transition from the current linear business model to a more sustainable business model, that focuses on other values than just growth. The core of SVBE is to allow companies to reduce negative externalities, such as waste produced, while maintaining economic viablity to the highest degree. The client that we’re working with is Natuur en Milieufederatie Drenthe (NMFD), with Emile Suringar being the contact person. Since our product will be used by the municipality of Drenthe, we have oriented ourself at one of the most prominent sectors in the region: non-durable consumer goods, e.g. clothing.

The aforementioned advice will be given via a flowchart, that will have three branches that SMEs can focus on: design production, supply chain and human resources, and these three branches will be then tied together by purpose driven marketing. Often, the largest disadvantage for these companies is the risk of economic impact, so we’re trying to develop guidelines for these companies so that it is easy for them to see how they can change and where they can change. This way companies can take practical steps towards sustainability. The overarching concept that underpins the guidelines is degrowth. Other important concepts are circular economy, doughnut economics and post-growth. Supporting these concepts are a wide range of literature, interviews and a case study.

The ultimate goal of this project is to make it concrete and easy for SMEs to transition to degrowth and apply SVBE.