Precious Plastic Blog 2: Building Bridges
In a world that is orienting itself towards a circular economy, new professions will be invented around completely new skillsets. This transition will require cognitive, technical, manual, and coordinative skills that can make these circular projects happen.
What better way is there to develop these skills, than by getting two universities like Utrecht University (UU) and Hogeschool Utrecht (HU) to work together? UU's Green Office believes that creating a bridge across Heidelberglaan between the two universities showcases how new bonds can be created, whether that be between universities, between disciplines, or between students and staff.
This blog item is the second of four blog posts about the UU and HU Precious Plastic project. Visit the Precious Plastic homepage to learn more.
Cooperation between disciplines
In the quest to tackle waste management problems, such as the tons of plastic jerrycans that not get recycled yet every year at UU (read blog 1), we will need whole new sets of eyes to monitor the management process. Research done by Circular Economy students from the UU has played a key role in evaluating the production chain the Precious Plastic project is creating, but UU students alone will not be able to make the supply chain work.
It will be Mechanical Engineering students that will build the Precious Plastic machines, but while messages about cooperation make it sound easy, communication isn’t always straightforward when you put social scientists and mechanical engineers in the same room. Luckily, there is a group of students that could meet both groups in the middle. Nathasha Melillo was one of the two Industrial Engineering students of Hogeschool Utrecht that were part of the project, and her study is focused on learning to bridge the social – technical divide. It was Natasha and her colleague’s ability to interface between the UU’s Green Office’s requirements for the project and the Mechanical Engineering students’ technical requirements that allowed them to design the project’s final product.
In this process, Natasha and her colleague learned that the key to bridging the gap to more technically oriented people is to ask questions. “Since the Mechanical engineering students talk in a really technical way, we had to ask them questions like: ‘what do you mean?’, ‘is the outcome like this or like that?’, but this process went really well. They were patient and always willing to further explain how something was done”, she said.
Cooperation between the universities, and their resources
Beyond the exchange of student knowledge, a project like Precious Plastic needs funding and a workplace. Precious Plastic was lucky to have received partial funding for the materials of the machine from TRANSFORM CE, a European fund that seeks to increase the uptake of recycled plastic by businesses. Thanks to the HU’s belonging to TRANSFORM CE’s network, and the potential that they saw in our project, Precious Plastic got one step further.
The only element that was still missing after the funding was a space to build the Precious Plastic machine under good supervision. Luckily, Willem Huijgens, Head of Department at the Scientific Instrumentation department of UU’s Faculty of Science, came into the picture.
This department normally focuses on developing, engineering and building equipment for education and research. Now, they will be lending their workspace in the Caroline Bleekergebouw to the Precious Plastic project group, along with their expertise. As Willem explains, “normally it is mostly students and staff from the Faculty of Science of UU which want to make use of our space and resources. The special thing now is that we are connecting with new partners from other parts of the UU and Utrecht Science Park. This expands our network and offers opportunities for more collaboration in the future”.
What will the outcome be?
Malou van der Vegt, a junior researcher and lecturer on Circular Economy at Hogeschool Utrecht who has had a role in supervising students in this project, believes that having more cooperation in experimental projects such as Precious Plastic bodes well for the future. “A move in a circular direction requires changes in the business world, and this requires experimentation”, she says. “It is important for students to have direct involvement with such experimental projects, so that they can carry this forward into the future. After all, they will become the employees of those organisations at a later stage”. Staff members such as Malou and Willem are also learning from Precious Plastic’s process.
Making use of two universities’ joint resources is a good start in showing students that inventing new ways of doing things is possible, by building on the work of other faculties and other universities. When it comes to cooperation within sustainability and circularity, Malou says “if we don’t do it ourselves, how can we show it to our students?”.
Follow the Green Office on Facebook, Instagram, or sign up to our newsletter to stay updated. In the next entry, we will take you through the process of building the Precious Plastic machines.