Focusing on day four within the Netherlands, the main portion of our day was spent at Nouryon, which is a chemical manufacturing plant that focuses on chemicals that are used in many day-to-day items. Their business relies on them being the subset of the product, so while the products that are being sold to consumers are not entirely all theirs, they sell more so of the building blocks and ingredients that go into the products such as cleaning supplies. Throughout all of the presentations, they highlighted that they were always focused on the end market, agriculture and food, personal car, natural resources, and through those aspects they are able to market and adapt their products to help the consumers the most. Nouryon focuses much of their research and development to the applications that their chemical formulas and concentrations can have within the realm of cleaning products, soaps, and many other products that implement the chemicals that Nouryon distributes.

With this, Nouryon also adds sustainability to be one of its biggest factors contributing to their business decisions. Within all of these different industries, there are a lot of factors to take into when running such a large corporation with so many moving parts. They are subscribed to working towards 10 of the UN’s sustainability goals, and even implement many renewable energy sources at their plants; 5 of which are all located in Brazil are completely carbon neutral. While being sustainable for the good of the Earth, Nouryon also promotes social sustainability as well through their initiatives in diversity and inclusion. Through these talks, it really emphasized the need for different perspectives especially through the lens of a diverse working group since they are working on different problems all the time. Their solution-based approach to dealing with the situations that they face utilizes these diverse perspectives since it allows them to showcase the pros and cons of many different pathways to solving a problem and allowing the consumer to decide what matters most to their customers.

Once the talks and lunch were finished, we were given a tour of their facilities and got to dig into the actual R&D labs to see what they were working on. While much of the lingo from the scientists flew over my head, I actually found much of the basics of what they were talking about, I had learned about these topics in my Chemistry 2 class that I had taken just a few months earlier. We were shown how they test and optimize chemicals that are found in laundry detergents, and it was somehow interesting since I never really had taken into account what it took for me to have clean laundry. After that tour, we headed to the safety lab where we were shown a ton of chemicals and how they react with things like fire, air, and even water which was a sight to see.

After this trip to Nouryon, we headed to an event where we could meet alumni of the University of Pittsburgh who were now living in the Netherlands for their career. I learned much about the tech industry within the Netherlands and a plethora of companies, and much about what sustainability aspects that the Netherlands industries are taking into account that never had come to my mind beforehand. Such as how for transporting big machinery, it may be great for creating computer chips, but it requires the size of 3 Boeing 747s, which are now done being created and used. Now there is a problem with trying to optimize the space of these big machines while still having the efficiency of creating 25,000 models of computer chips in just a few hours. After the alumni event, some of us decided to check out the Food Truck Festival that was going on right next door which turned out to be a big hit and a ton of fun.