International Sustainability Consultancy
Richard Franse on his internship at BECO, June 2007
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“For my SBB Master track, I did an internship at BECO, which is an international sustainability consultancy firm with offices in the Netherlands, Belgium and South-Africa. During my internship I mainly worked on four projects:
- The Corporate Social Responsibility Report for Rabobank (financial services provider);
- The Corporate Social Responsibility Report for Achmea (an insurance company);
- Long-term agreements on energy in the rubber- and plastics processing industry, the asphalt industry, and the laundry industry;
- Sustainable procurement in municipalities.For the Corporate Social Responsibility Report projects the main activities were data-analysis, data-interpreting, and data-processing. Examples of the data which were interpreted are flight kilometres, lease kilometres, energy use and paper use.
For the Long-term agreements on energy project, energy data of the rubber- and plastics processing industry, the asphalt industry, and the laundry industry were analysed. These data were checked and completed with e.g. annexes (such as benchmark graphs), of which a report was made.
A project which was one of my personal favourites was the sustainable procurement in municipalities. The Dutch government strives to a 100 % sustainable procurement in 2010, and 50 % sustainable procurement for local governments such as municipalities. During this project I assisted in developing a sustainability procurement scan for BECO. Also I have written a draft of a sustainable procurement handbook for a municipality in the province of Zuid-Holland.
Working in environmental consultancy is very challenging. It requires various skills such as planning skills, working independently and working on different projects at the same time, next to quickly acquiring up-to-date knowledge, which you can practice and refine while working at BECO. All projects described above were very interesting to work on. The projects offered an interesting insight in sustainability issues in the business community.
The common theme of the projects was Corporate Sustainable Responsibility (CSR), an area which is in the news every day. Personally I found it very interesting to have an insight in the background of the sustainability news and of the embedded (sustainability) issues, particularly in a period in which sustainability experiences a breakthrough, developing into a mainstream field of knowledge.
In summary: an internship at a sustainability consultancy firm is an interesting and varying job which takes places in a dynamic business environment and can be recommended to everyone.”
Find more information on SBB internships and more SBB internship experiences on our website.
