Circular Economy Week? Why?
If you are ‘working on circularity’ every day already, what is your role in Circular Economy Week?
We’ve been saying it for a few years now. Loudly and on from the core of our beings: ‘Throwing away is a waste!’ Every day we rethink our habitual behavior and use everything you normally throw in the trash, to show the world how we can still make beautiful things out of it. And you should know that it makes us proud, also because of all the admiration we receive for the 17th century ships that we build from waste plastic.
Every day we are actively guided by our mission: to let everyone discover that throwing away is a waste. So when there’s a ‘Circular Economy Week’, we think: why?! We rather go on holiday, we ‘do’ circularity every day.
Pump up the gears
Of course we don’t, because even we (or maybe exactly we) also have a role in Circular Economy Week. We receive the members of ‘De Hoornse Compagnie’, the business association of Hoorn. We do this in our C2A Homes factory, where we build modular tiny houses from waste materials. Not to make these entrepreneurs aware of the need to become circular – undoubtedly, they are for a long time already – but to put them in a higher gear towards circularity. The task to get there is large, so everyone has to step up their game.
As far as we’re concerned, it’s not just going to be just a nice chat. If you join us, we want to know which steps you will take tomorrow to make your company more sustainable. Not without obligation, but task-setting! This is quite inconvenient, but yes, there is a social relevance that gives us the guts to do it anyway.
‘Gosh, you are so strict’
Sustainability is quite a complex process that you cannot simply oversee. We also experience this, like any business that wants do its part. How do you get a new insight if no one has an idea or clue what the next step is? When in this position, do a little experiment to get out of your normal routine. But do take that step, even without knowing the outcome. Because if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. Start small, but start today.
If you now think ‘Gosh, you are so strict’, then we say: ‘perhaps’. But don’t forget, such an experiment is also just a lot of fun! Once you have taken on such a challenge, it becomes quite addictive and can take you into new, surprising areas. We also never thought that a small piece of waste plastic – our well-known mushroom tray – would eventually push us via Antarctica into the construction of a ‘fluitschip’, a huge Dutch cargo ship. Besides sustainability, that mushroom container has brought us and many others an awful lot and that cries out for more.
