5 minute read
CAROLIN SPIRINCKX: VITO FOREVER!
Making a career does not mean changing jobs or employees every so often. You can also grow and develop your talents within the same organisation. Living proof of this is Carolin Spirinckx, alumna of Group T Campus and Project Manager at VITO, the largest multidisciplinary research institute in Flanders. A portrait of a passionate engineer.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Carbon Footprint (CF), Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), Sustainability and Circularity Assessment and other hot topics in environmental technologies have no secrets for Carolin. In her almost thirty-year career at VITO she has built up a comprehensive knowledge and experience in sustainable technologies. Carolin has been involved in an almost uncountable number of projects in which widely different products have been analysed with both government and industry as partners. Carolin’s job and developments at VITO are so intertwined that she was awarded the title of VITO Ambassador in 2020. “I’m a part of the ambassadors community because we are proud of what VITO realises and are ready to help boost VITO’s visibility, reputation and impact”, says the Project Manager.
Vision
Carolin graduated in 1993 as a chemical engineer at the then Group T university college in Leuven, now KU Leuven-Group T Campus. “I was looking for an engineering study where you didn’t become a nerd and where there was a focus on environmental issues”, she says. “At Group T, I found both. A study that focused not only on technology but also on management and communication. And a brand new specialisation in Environmental Technology. It was a choice that gave my further professional life a decisive turn. To this day, I remain grateful to the university college, not only because of the training but also for the vision of engineering I received. A vision that states that technology is not an end in itself but should be a tool that makes this world a better and sustainable place. And that the engineers who know and master this tool therefore bear a great responsibility. I have pretty much made this vision my personal mission. In that respect, you could also call me a Group T Campus ambassador.”
Life cycle assessment
Carolin finds the job of a lifetime at VITO in Mol, a leading independent research institute in the field of clean tech and sustainable development in three main areas: climate adaptation ant mitigation, sustainable resource economy and sustainable living environment. Carolin starts as a Project Engineer/Researcher. There, she is immediately engaged in life cycle assessment (LCA) at that time a new research area with guidelines and standards still to be developed. “My first assignment was to investigate the production and use of biodiesel. A complete LCA was prepared, starting from the cultivation of rapeseed in the field to its use as motor fuel.”
Over the next few years, Carolin sees LCA changing rapidly. “Originally mainly energy aspects were investigated but that quickly evolved into a global analysis of the full environmental impact of a product or technology. This led to new concepts such as the environmental index of a product and the environmental balance sheet that gives a complete picture of the total environmental impact, from cradle to grave.”
“LCA was obviously not an end in itself”, Carolin continues. “It also contained concrete improvement options on the basis of which companies could optimise their products thanks to the identification of weaknesses in terms of, for example, energy consumption, choice of materials, emissions, amount of waste, etc. The ul- timate goal was to encourage preventive eco-design where new products and technologies are developed in function of environmental friendliness, reuse, etc.”
Project manager
Over the course of her career, Carolin sees the public becoming more and more environmentally conscious, environmental laws and standards tightening and the market for green products growing. The European Green Deal represents an important milestone in this development. But Carolin’s job at VITO is also evolving. In 2010, she becomes Project Manager within the Smart Energy and Built Environment unit. When one year later KU Leuven, VITO, imec and Hasselt University establish the research centre EnergyVille, interesting perspectives open up again. Indeed, this new partnership will focus specifically on energy transition. “The complementarity of the research partners enables EnergyVille to integrate the entire value chain of the energy system”, says Carolin. For her, this means broadening the radius of action, including internationally.
Relevant
Even though we are almost 30 years on, Carolin still radiates as much enthusiasm as ever. “How could it be otherwise?”, she wonders. “Our work is more socially relevant than ever. We have just launched Europe’s first pilot line here to extract biomolecules from waste. We will open a new research complex in 2025. Flemish government funding has been increased substantially. And -last but not least- we have had a female CEO since last year, Inge Neven, who wants to make VITO twice as big by 2030. What more could you wish for?”
Yves Persoons
www.vito.be
