Featured Member: Dutch Consulate

Foresight Design's Emily Pilloton recently spoke with Cor Hersbach, Deputy Consul General with the Dutch Consulate, about the debut of Chicago's Sustainable Business Alliance, sustainability, and what the Americans have to learn from the Dutch.

What is the role of the Dutch Consulate and what do you, as the Deputy Consul General, do at the Dutch Consulate?

My main role at the consulate is to promote business ties and business opportunities between Dutch companies and companies in the Midwest. We cover 14 states, but a large part of our  focus is Chicagoland, Michigan and Ohio. We are a small consulate, and represent a small country with a lot of business interests. But it’s a two-way street. It’s not like we want to bring Dutch companies here, sell their products, and then leave. It has to work as a dialog for a mutual benefit. It’s all related. We often call ourselves “brokers in contacts.”

As a Deputy Consul General I am head of the economic department. We have one approach that is proactive, and one that is reactive. The reactive approach is that anyone from the Netherlands who knocks on our door and says, "Could you assist me in finding a contact, I want to sell my cookies in Chicago," “or my bicycles,” “or whatever.” We oblige and help them.

The proactive approach is where we ask ourselves what are areas in the Netherlands we feel we are strong: have excellent products, technology, or knowledge. We’ve identified biotechnology and life sciences, and creative industries, architecture, and design, to some extent music, and last, but not least, renewable energy, environmental technologies, sustainability, and environmental issues. That’s one of the areas where we feel we’re very strong. So what we do with the proactive approach is we actually go out, find out what’s happening in these fields, where is it interesting for the Netherlands to connect with organizations, with cities, states, companies, in those fields. We introduce ourselves, we tell them about the network, what we do, what we’re looking for, and we identify opportunities.

For example, one of my favorite Dutch companies is 100% owned by the city of Amsterdam. It is the Waste-to-Energy company. They take collected garbage and run it through their plant, all their processes and technologies, and they come out with renewable energy, grade-A concrete, and limestone bricks. They also have a connection with the water treatment plant and the sewage plant..Out of that, they create renewable energy that goes back to the sewage treatment plant. So it’s a connection between the two. They also reclaim precious metals like silver. The company is making money for the city of Amsterdam.

I talked to the city of Chicago and made an introduction for them. We went over to the Department of Environment, where we spoke with Brendan Daley, Deputy Commissioner, and Waste-to-Energy gave a presentation. Because we have that network and connection with the city, we can provide an easy introduction. That company works in a field that we proactively pursue, environmental technology, we identify that the City of Chicago is looking for something like that, and we put them together.

Does it often go the other way too, where you’ll be approached by a Chicago company who is looking to expand internationally and would like to know more about the Dutch market or potential opportunities?

Oh, yes. We will of course listen to them, talk to them, and when they really want to go across the ocean, we will put them in touch with our neighbors here, the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency. We assist Dutch businesses coming over here, and they assist American’s going over there, but there is a crossover, the networks overlap.

 

I wrote my thesis on Dutch Design, but it’s a very different approach. It’s almost inherent to the Dutch.

Yes, exactly. It’s inherent. It’s a part of us. It’s now being touted and promoted, but here, you become an accomplished architect when you’re more established in your career, and then you get good projects. In Holland, you’ll have young architects, who have just come from university, and a few years into it they’ll get the projects. Because it’s just a part of our psyche to say, “Give these young people a chance,” because that’s where you renew and innovate. I’m not saying that an older architect can’t be innovative, but someone who’s younger is often more adventurous or willing to experiment or gamble. It’s a different approach.

How do you find Chicago as a city or Chicagoland as a region to be particularly receptive, or maybe not receptive, to issues of sustainability?

It’s great to see that the city and the mayor do an awful lot. There’s always more to be done, always more can be done, and if I compare it to where we are in Europe, the Netherlands especially, there’s a lot to still be done, but, they are doing it, and they’re committed.

The East and West coasts seem to be a little bit ahead of the Midwest, but I think that happens in a lot of ways. The Midwest could be considered perhaps sort of slow catching up, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because if you’re a little bit behind the development, your catch up is quicker, because you can learn from the mistakes that others made. That’s why it’s so good now for Chicago.

I am from San Francisco, I just moved out here almost three years ago, and it’s the same way there. One of the first things I noticed when I moved here was “What do I do with this empty bottle?”

I had exactly the same experience. I lived out in Wilmette for a year, and now I live in the city, but our garage was full of empty bottles, because I didn’t want to put it in the normal garbage. I didn’t know where to go.

The interesting thing is, in the Netherlands now, it is so inherent in everyone’s mind and daily operations to do that, to separate, we don’t know any different. At the last symposium, Sustainable Water Fronts, we had an advisor to our Prime Minister who is responsible for the environment. She advises our political leader on the issues. She said that with the current state of technology, we really don’t need to do source separation anymore. Just put it all together and throw it in there. But, she said, “You know what it is, if we would come to citizens with the message: 'Don’t worry about it, just chuck everything together, your glass, your paper.' There would be an uproar. Everyone would say ‘That’s not right, you should separate!’” So that’s an issue they’re struggling with right now. A city like Chicago can now benefit from that new technology, they don’t even have to have the policy in place to get the citizens to separate the waste.  All these big buildings here, 50 or 80 floors, you have the chute, you shove everything down, so what are you going to do? Is there a chute for bottles? One for paper? There isn’t. So it would be a major investment for all those buildings to do that, but with the technology that I just described, you don’t need to do it! You don’t have to change the garbage collecting, you just get the same trucks, same bags, put everything in it, and take it to the factory.

How would you define sustainability, and specifically, in the business sector, what makes a business or an organization sustainable?

I think you can look at it two ways. Sustainability is the usual: people, planet, profit. These are all true and valid. In the European context, it’s so inherent, but in the American context people actually advertise themselves for instance as a green architect because it’s not implied.

We presented a biomass company from the Netherlands here to a number of Midwestern Chicago contacts and I explained to the Dutch businessman, "You’re going to present your product here, but what you should realize is that to these American contacts, you should not say this is good for the environment and hope to sell your product from that. What you should make clear to them is that they can make money or save money with your technology. That it’s good for the environment, well, that’s nice too." One of the guys who was there, an immigrant who still spoke Dutch and overheard what I said, remarked, “You’re absolutely right, the only green thing in the United States is the dollar.” It’s funny, but to some extent it sums up the sustainability thinking here.

Twenty years ago, it was sort of a hippie-generation, flower-power idea, but we’ve come along way and it now makes business sense to look at sustainability because using less energy means lower bills, and more profit. Again, the green thing is the dollar. I think we’ve come a long way, sustainability is becoming more and more a part of peoples’ thinking, for some people it’s because they want to treat the environment well, and for some people they realize that “Hey, doing this is not necessarily something that costs money, but I can actually save money and it’s good for the environment as well.” And I’m sort of in-between the two. I think it’s important from a personal and government perspective, because we live for the here and now, but the less money the government spends or a company spends on energy or building construction, the more money you have for education. So be opportunistic, but pragmatic about it.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that certain states are ahead of the rest of the country. It also seems that in the U.S., it’s not going to be a top-down movement like what we’ve had in Europe: starting with the European Union, and then trickling down to the states—the countries—and then they create legislation. Here, it’s a bottom-up movement. It could take five, ten, fifteen years, but eventually the federal level will be pushed by the bottom-up grassroots level to change things.

It starts with you as an individual citizen who talks to friends, colleagues, and starts a community. The Chicago Sustainable Business Alliance is an example of that. There is no federal, state, or city alliance. The city’s doing a lot, but there’s no such thing to promote sustainable businesses. So it comes from grassroots.

How might the Sustainable Business Alliance assist the work you are doing?

We are interested in the Chicago Sustainable Business Alliance because it’s one of our focus areas, and I think it’s a great idea to get together, to rally, because you could say, “I’m in it to promote the networks.” That’s my job. But also just as a human being, as a person, as a citizen, a person living in this city, I also feel a responsibility to promote that, not only from a Dutch perspective, but from a Chicago perspective. So it works both ways. Hopefully Dutch business gets something out of it, and hopefully Chicago will get something out of it.

Being an international conduit for people and organizations, how have you found that a discussion of sustainability has benefited your international and diplomatic relationships? Or to think of it in another way, do you think sustainability has the potential to become a connection between countries?

Oh absolutely. The Kyoto Protocol, for example, is one where you see internationally that people are talking about it. There is an engagement in the dialog, instead of a group of countries that does A, and a group that does B, because things like pollution don’t stop at the border. Anyway the wind blows, it will go. When Chernobyl happened, it went all over Europe. So there has to be a dialog between countries, because it affects everyone. Our energy consumption affects consumption elsewhere. The fact that China and India are catching up and growing at an accelerated rate and will be consuming an enormous amounts of energy within a few years, if they don’t deal with the pollution side of that now, it’ll be bad for all of us.

So, yes, I think there is a dialog. Sustainability should be an international discussion, and it’s part of our job to explore what the benefits are and how we can help each other.  As soon as there’s enough economic sense—again we come back to the green dollar—to create and implement new technologies, it will take off. I had a discussion with someone this morning who said, “What if Africa would reach the same level of society as we have in Europe and the U.S.? We’d have 50 million extra cars. Think of what that would do for pollution.” But my answer was, “Well, 50 million cars extra would give oil companies the incentive to come up with technologies that will make all those cars and current cars run on some sort of cleaner renewable energy.” Because then it makes sense. The more cars you have, the more money they make. I think partly that plays a role that will motivate people to invent something, to do something, but it’s also a willingness to do it even if it is at a premium cost. That’s where there’s a difference in roles of government in Europe, or the Netherlands, and here.

For example in Holland, there are incentives for citizens or companies to implement or to buy sustainable products. There are all sorts of subsidies for that, through the government, but we also pay much higher taxes. The government doesn’t do that here, because there are less taxes.

What do you think Chicago or American businesses can learn from the Dutch experiences in sustainability? The important lesson is that we at a more developed level than the U.S. That is not a criticism, it has to do with all sorts of different factors, like the type and level of government support, the different ways that education plays a role, and for us, like you say, it’s “inherent.” The main thing that Chicagoland can learn from Europe is to benefit from our mistakes, and our insights, and you can make that leap that we’ve gone through in the last 30 years, you can go through the same processes faster.

 

top of page