In recent years, global environmental policy has become almost a single-issue arena: most companies and policy makers are seemingly fixated on climate change. Though the fate of our climate is undeniably an extremely important issue, in the context of achieving a sustainable future as a whole, it is just one piece of the puzzle, which cannot even be addressed without adopting a broader perspective.

Our world is littered with the physical remnants of past ideologies calcified in the form of buildings, plazas, and streets. One of the most ubiquitous of these is the result of the conversion of the early Modernist utopian vision into cheap, rapid-to-build housing estates carrying the promise of a “modern” life for everyone. The postwar reconstruction effort saw these housing estates efficiently stamped out all over the Western world.

Nuclear energy has recently seen national policies and public opinion turn in its favor. Governments around the world, including Italy and Sweden, are lifting bans on new plant construction. Not alone in the developing world, India and China are pursuing ambitious expansions of their nuclear power programs.

According to a 2010 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report, 20 countries without nuclear power plants are expected to have nuclear power on line by 2030 (1). Headlines such as “Nuclear’s Great Expectations” (2), “Power up! The rise of the nuclear option” (3) and “Going Nuclear” (4) attest to a paradigmatic shift from looking at nuclear (fission) energy as a 20th century problem towards seeing it as a 21st century solution. In the Netherlands plans to construct two new nuclear power plants are in an advanced stage, seemingly undeterred by the Fukishima events.

This project is a visual exploration of the Dutch waste water sector in 2030. It takes a closer look at the role of waste water processing facilities for the provision of clean water, renewable energy, and valuable material inputs for society of the future.

The vision for 2030 concerns the role of waste water management in four major parts of society: the built environment, agriculture, industry, and natural lands.

Overschie is a neighborhood in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, with unique properties:

• surrounded by highways and an airport
• environmentally compromised
• Public health challenges
• a village within the city
• high social capital

Social housing organization Woonstad and the city council of Overschie want to make this neighborhood more sustainable, but where do they start? To answer this question we did a quickscan of the neighborhood to find its opportunities and made a custom inspiration book filled with possibilities to work towards a sustainable city district. Read below for more info, and of course, download the book!

BKCity is a magnificent listed monument of more than 30.000m2 functioning as the faculty of Architecture of the TU Delft. Except created a phased plan to make this historic educational building energy and carbon neutral within ten years.

The plan converts the building into a didactic tool that puts sustainability at the heart of education for generations of architects, introducing a unique in-building ecosystem that provides an inspiring environment, functional qualities and cost savings.

Greenprint features over 150 pages of innovations in our homes, cities and daily life. From eco-houses and neighborhoods to streetlamps activated by moonlight, social innovations, urban agriculture and much more. Greenprint shows how sustainability can change your world from the smallest to the biggest scale.

We developed a sustainabile conversion and development plan for the post-war social housing area Schiebroek-Zuid in Rotterdam.  The project provides a flexible and exemplary roadmap for converting the neighborhood into a self-sufficient and sustainable area. It applies innovative energy solutions, urban farming, social and economic programs, secondary currencies, and adaptive redevelopment strategies.

This project was commissioned by housing corporation Vestia and agricultural research network InnovatieNetwerk.

Dandelion is a next generation (web 3.0) software application that binds scientific, social and economic data from all over the world in an immersive visual environment. It's like google on steroids, allowing you to visually fly through three dimensional realms of information, putting it at your fingertips and making it useful.

It enables a boost in productivity for knowledge management, research and social connectivity for anyone involved with research and development.

Dandelion is developed in partnership with the Dutch government and Storrm CS consultants.

To demonstrate that a sustainable office interior can be exciting, affordable, and very practical we decided to make our own work space an example of just that.

The Except office in Rotterdam is located in a restored office building, which had previously stood empty for over a decade. Our renovation process brought together new ideas about collaboration, innovative material use, and exciting design.

Miya's Sushi in New Haven, CT, has been our favorite restaurant for years, and for good reason. Miya's is a home away from home that produces award winning fusion sushi that places heaven on your tongue, while being the forefront of social and environmental sustainability.

To aid in this, we produced a menu with graphic maps of the unique fish selection of Miya's for internal and external use.

Together with MODINT and DNV we mapped the Dutch carpet sector and developed a road map to a circular carpet industry in 2030. We used system mapping and visualization techniques to bring at-a-glance insight to the stakeholder meetings. With this insight we plotted interventions to transition the industry towards a circular and bio-based industry within two decades.

We developed a roadmap of the Dutch meat process sector, production and processing companies and their suppliers, together with DNV. The road map shows opportunities for optimal use of all energy and material flows in the product chain of chicken, pork and beef, and maps their sources. The maps bring insight to all stakeholders involved, and enables decisions on improving entire sections of the production chain at once.