Last year, together with the Top Sectors Energy and Agro Food and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, we started preparations for the merger between TKI BBE and TKI Chemie. The new TKI Green Chemistry and Circularity is now a fact and Peter Berben has started as the new director. We waved goodbye to Oscar van den Brink in March with a sparkling dinner in Utrecht, with many personal words and gifts. The new TKI team is now working together on the new roadmaps. The merger helps to position the chemical sector as an enabler in the many transitions we are currently in. The chemistry is not the problem, but part of the solution.
This is also reflected in the new Growth Fund proposals submitted this year, namely Future Carbon and Biobased Circular. Both proposals focus on circular carbon building blocks for the chemical industry. Future Carbon by recovering carbon from captured CO2 and Biobased Circular from agricultural residual flows. I eagerly await the verdict of the Growth Fund Committee. With these two projects and the Circular Plastics approved last year, we have a good basis for shaping circular chemistry.
We are also already targeting Growth Fund round four. Earlier I reported that we also worked on a proposal for Materials Independence (creating independence in our demand for critical materials) in round 3, but we have not yet managed to do that because we first need to clarify what the agenda for this is. must be. In collaboration with TNO, we organized two sessions in February with representatives from many organizations and discussed where the challenges lie and how we can create opportunities. We are now working hard on a national agenda for critical materials that we want to present to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy in August. Hopefully we will succeed so we can hand it over during the summit that we are organizing on the role of innovative chemistry for ‘critical raw materials in the energy transition’ during the IUPAC|CHAINS2023 conference in August (21st) in The Hague. Based on a model that we had developed by TNO, we show what the energy transition requires of critical materials in relation to their availability. A number of experts will also shed light on this. To flatten him: that doesn’t look good, we need more than there is, especially if we don’t want to do business with countries that have a lot of those materials right now.
Finally, I would like to look back at a few special moments in recent months:
On March 25, I was invited to join the jury of the ChemistryNL Great Outreach Challenge. The talent students of the ISPT and COAST talent programs (ASPT, ATLAS, PTTP) were tasked this year to develop a program to convince students (primary and secondary education) to study chemistry. Incredibly nice to see with how much enthusiasm the students had tackled this. It is striking to see how TikTok played a major role in various proposals. In the end, we declared the winner to be the team that had developed ‘Wotterdam’; a card game with which you have to link the water treatment to the city for drinking water. You have to build all the chemical purification steps that are needed by collecting cards, but of course there are also sabotage cards! I hope the game will actually come to market.
On April 17 at KIVI, I received the white paper “End of waste” during the End of Waste conference. The title of the meeting was “No time to waste” and that hit the nail on the head. Reuse and recycling are often hindered because the “waste” must first receive the end-of-waste status before you can reuse it. It is high time that we started to see waste as a raw material! Thanks to InvestNL and Groene Chemie Nieuwe Economie for this important whitepaper and the interesting conference.
Last week I visited the JEC 2023, the major composites fair in Paris. I was a guest in the Netherlands pavilion and I spoke with the various Dutch exhibitors there, to get a sense of what such a pavilion means at a foreign fair. At the end of the day, Jan Versteeg, the Dutch ambassador to France, came by and I was given a tour of the top Dutch exhibitors at the fair. It’s fantastic to be able to listen to the stories of passionate entrepreneurs, that always makes my heart beat faster. Of course I couldn’t resist asking with my circular cap’on’ what the current situation is with the recycling of composites, but considerable steps are also being made there and that is also good news.
And of course I also attended a lot of meetings, in which we work together with fellow Top Sector Chairs on a stronger innovation climate in the Netherlands and I’m actually starting to like that more and more. Until then, see you in three months!
Jacqueline Vaessen
Jacqueline Vaessen – out and about deel 2 – in Dutch
First year as a chair of Top Sector ChemistryNL
Out and about part one
