“Sustainability implies understand the issue and to tackle it jointly”

Image credit: Shane Rounce on Unsplash

Cooperation is key but there are both legal and mental barriers to overcome

Description
(6:19) “I think something we kinda forgot, or we were pressed into another direction, is the topic of way more collaboration. Compliance is a very important topic but, as always, there’s a certain pendulum on things. And at the moment, the compliance pendulum is on the far right and everybody’s afraid to talk to someone else because it could be a compliance issue. For sure, what happened 30 years ago was completely the wrong thing, that you discuss prices. But I think more or less everyone in the value chain is having the same issues and everyone tries to solve it by him or herself because that’s how we are trained now in Europe. One of the reasons why we joined the EIT Manufacturing was because we see a big benefit in having at least your value chain from steel production to the final product with a moderated setup to discuss certain issues.”

Relevance
While policy and regulation is important, European governments and manufacturers should find approaches that enhance public-private partnerships and other forms of cooperation to tackle the most pressing sustainability challenges of the future.