Don Ritzen, known as co-founder of Rockstart, is launching a start-up with which he wants to help Dutch people become more sustainable in a very practical way. A web app, stimulated by local authorities, is central to this.
Shift is the name of the start-up with which Ritzen wants to have forty percent of the municipalities working in five years. Over the past two years, he has developed a program that encourages participants to make positive sustainable behavioral changes, resulting in an average CO2 reduction of 25 percent per participant.
The concept is not high-flying, but rather fits in with the personal world of the participants. For example, one person has already made progress in making their home more sustainable, while the other has made their diet more sustainable. Ritzen will help them explore other, new paths. “Eighty percent of people want to become more sustainable, but don’t know how.”
The platform creates a personal psychological profile of users, based on their carbon footprint and answers to a series of questions. Users get access to sessions with experts for advice on sustainable and plant-based eating, circularity, energy use in the home, waste reduction, travel and other relevant topics. In addition, Shift offers personalized content, initiatives and sustainable actions via links to products and events. The database contains approximately two thousand such options, from small local to national.
“We work closely with municipalities. They are partners in informing people to make sustainable choices. The municipality of Amsterdam is participating and there is still room for two municipalities in this phase.” The Shift project is distributed white label via their sites, with the start-up manning the helpdesk for any questions from citizens. In the next phase, after evaluating the first practical experiences, Ritzen wants to scale up to eventually 150 to 200 of the 342 municipalities in the Netherlands.
The entrepreneur: “Municipalities themselves are now mainly concerned with energy transition and policy making. We show that this only affects seventeen percent of the CO2 footprint, and that they therefore leave 83 percent behind. That is the part we are focusing on.”
Shift has received 350,000 euros in financing from Innovation Fund North Holland for the development of its sustainability platform.
Source: www.emerce.nl
