Sustainability session Jamboree 2025
Sustainability break-out session Nikhef Jamboree 2025
Summary of Nikhef’s shared commitment and community input toward a more sustainable future.
Shaping a sustainable Nikhef together?
The new Ambition Document marks an exciting leap toward a more sustainable Nikhef. Real change happens together—every voice and idea matters. A heartfelt thank-you for your input and the energy and inspiration shared during the Jamboree!
Hereby the ideas shared during the session, per discussion section.
How do we design for future experiments?
Conclusion Science first and working together on a global scale. Sustainability second: include experts, energy recovery, when to run (during night). Promote sustainability programming and Nuclear power > fossil fuel.
Draft
- Energy that we put in should be used as output: create energy efficient colliders
- Take into account the impact on the future
- How much energy does it cost to make everything?
- Get things more transparant
- Who is paying for what?
- Nucear power
- Unique design of your accelerator
- Working Together on global scale
- What is more important physics & research or sustainability?
- Besides the accelerator what else costs energy? Travel etc?
- Who determines 'how much' energy something can cost?
- Maybe make decisions and explain to others
- What will we discover & how can we do it as sustainable as possible.
- Inlcude experts on the topic of Sustainability
What are reasons that you want to travel, and what could motivate you to 'stay home'?
Conclusion
- There should exist / start a profile online for young researchers to present their work
- Give insight into the true costs of travel
- More reports of conerences by those who went there
- Assign a fixed travel budget per person, reward people not using it.
- Competition: award the most 'green' group at Nikhef.
Draft
| Travel | Stay home |
|---|---|
| Meeting up with someone | Saving time |
| Participation in experiment that needs physical presence | Saving resources |
| Visiting family | Saving money |
| Curiosity towards new places | Saving the environment |
| Conference talks & networking | Immigration / visa / security issues |
| Less distraction than in the office | Excellent ICT facilities |
| The excitement is happening elsewhere | The trouble of travel is not sufficiently compensated for |
| Combine multiple goals in one travel trip | Working from home is pleasant and efficient |
How do you motivate our colleagues that are not intrinsically motivated to behave more sustainable?
Draft
- Money, other rewards
- Make sustainable behaviour more convenient / easier
- Gratification
- Social pressure / shaming
- Push for systems that give insight of individual behaviour changes
- Increase the daily allowance / max hotel price if the travel there is sustainable; can be used to offset the 'inconvenience' of longer travel time
- The main problem we identified is that sustainable travel is usually less convenient; our solution to offset that inconvenience
- Are uor office supplies sustainable? For example: notebooks from recycled paper (paper cups in coffee area)
- Use sustainable programming languages like C, C++ or fortran instead of python or similar (training oppurtunities).
- Prioritise code in sustainable languages on the cluster
- Behavioural feedback: meassuring CO2 emissions of each trip and tell us how much CO2 we emit in relation to an average household.
- Discourage use of LLMs
- Discourage working from home (for those who can commute)
How can we reduce the amount of materials / stuff we order?
Conclusion We have looked at how we can reduce what we order, but mostly how we can reduce what we throw away. For this it would be good to coorindate among each other, so that not everybody needs to buy evertyhing. It would also be good to re-evaluate what materials we use where, to see if we can reduce the amount of harmfull sources used. So communicate and coordinate and keep track and trace of what we do.
Draft What do we order? - is it really a problem?
- All electronics require more earth materials
- Cooling liquids and gasses in detectors
- Helium, copper, Xenon
- Find green alternatives
- Recycle Helium
- Track the waste
- Keep track of your stuff (shared database)
- Recycle detectors
- Avoid leaks
Key points:
- Copper
- Coordinate / plan
- Gas choice
- Cooling liquids
- Helium
- Leaks / better sealing
- Re-use detector parts
- Track & trace
- Raw materials ?
- Detector materials
- Recycling
Apart from 'daily waste', how would you see Nikhef supporting 'reuse' and 'repair'?
Conclusion
- Register -> for furniture either: fix and resure or give away, and registry for engineering -> registry to find.
- Registry + waste announce: have someone (maybe facilitites) create a website with the material we have and stuff that will be thrown out by the end of the week. Could be 0.2. FTE
Draft
- Fix malfunctioning equipment (monitors, desks etc)
- Reuse / Resell / Give away
- Sustainable options for paper out of reused paper
- olar panels for low energy consumption like lights or desktop + making building vooler by reducing sun, so less cooling requirement
- Central registry for storing 'stuff', so as to not waste time finding it or re-buying it if cannot be found.
- Wattage counter in more detail (fo find inefficiency)
- Reduce the paper for drying hands in toilets by reusable towels (those in canteen)