Je said, “Just love me.” / You had gelatinous eyes and sharp teeth. / Isn’t that why I cried when you died?
These lines are from the poem series The gill arches turn salmon pink that environmental scientist Emma Zuiderveen (32) wrote in response to an environmental disaster that occurred in the summer of 2022 in the Oder River, which flows from the Czech Republic via Poland and Germany to the Baltic Sea. “That is one of the worst environmental disasters in recent European history,” she says. “Almost all life in the river died.”
The Joint Research Center (JRC), a research institute of the European Commission, where Zuiderveen did part of her PhD research, published a report on this environmental disaster. “When I read that hundreds of thousands of fish had died, I felt nothing at all, because the report was written in a detached and technical manner,” she says. “But it is very sad. That’s why I decided to turn it into poems.”
“The climate and environmental problems of the petrochemical industry, which I worked on during my PhD research, are actually very sad,” says Zuiderveen. “That is about illness due to particulate matter and loss of biodiversity. But I didn’t really feel that sadness, because I wrote about it in technical language and was mainly concerned with data and graphs. That worked as a shield to not feel the sadness.”
That shield wasn’t usually a problem. “You don’t want to be sad for 40 hours a week,” she says. “But now that I am completing my dissertation, I am more concerned with making the translation, to make the knowledge I have gained more useful – for example with poems.”
Zuiderveen has been writing prose and poetry for some time. Her poems have appeared in various literary magazines and a poetry collection. “My big dream was always to publish a book,” she says. That dream seems to be coming true. In addition to her dissertation, her debut novel will be published in 2025 The Rest is naked. Zuiderveen has always been broadly and socially interested. Through the interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree in science and technology with a specialization in chemistry, she ended up doing PhD research on the sustainability of the petrochemical industry at Radboud University in Nijmegen.
Alternative raw materials
Why is making the petrochemical industry more sustainable important? “This industry is responsible for a large part of oil consumption. And they do not use more than half of that for energy, but as a raw material,” says Zuiderveen. “Almost all plastic items, such as plastic packaging and furniture, are made from six basic chemicals that the petrochemical industry makes from petroleum. To become more sustainable, we not only have to make the production process cleaner. We also need to find alternative raw materials.”
Zuiderveen looked at alternative ways to make building blocks from plants. “You can make plastics in the same way, but your building blocks are made from biomass instead of petroleum.” There are already various (electrochemical) techniques for this that use different categories of biomass, she continues. “For example, you can use waste, such as wood chips or agricultural waste. Or you can grow grain or soybeans for it, but you have to be careful not to compete with the food industry. You don’t want to trade food for plastic. You can also grow large-scale, well-growing crops that do not compete with the food industry, such as eucalyptus and willows. You have to clear the ground for that.”
Zuiderveen compared alternatives and calculated the environmental and climate impact, such as CO2emissions and deforestation. She looked at the entire chain, from the origin of the raw materials (biomass) to the production process and what happens to the product after use: is it recycled or incinerated? “These were exploratory calculations because the techniques are still in their infancy and we had to estimate how they will develop in the coming years and how sustainable the electricity mix will look like.”
Not one golden egg
One of the most important findings was that the CO2emissions are halved on average if you switch to biomaterials made from plants, says Zuiderveen. But that doesn’t solve the problem. Another study showed that none of the alternatives examined remains within the so-called planetary boundaries. These limits, which were introduced in 2009 Natureconcern land use, water scarcity and emissions, among other things. We have to stay within that to make sustainable use of the earth.
“The alternatives are not yet good enough because, for example, the materials are often burned after use, which produces CO2emissions,” says Zuiderveen. “They can also cause other environmental problems. For example, if you use a lot of fertilizer to grow biomass, this can cause a surplus of nutrients in the water.” Then the fish die.
“There is not one golden egg. You need a combination of measures to really make this industry more sustainable. That’s why I think it’s important to share this story.”
Although Zuiderveen is now mainly working on ways to translate her knowledge into a less scientific form, she does not want to leave the academic world completely. “I really enjoy research. But I’m still looking for how I can continue to do that.”