Where does your passion for sustainability come from?
“I think I’m a sustainability baby because I was born on the 10th of October [Sustainability Day, Ed.] and my mom used to do sustainability projects in Costa Rica. Growing up, I loved coming to the Netherlands for the greenery and nature. It’s a passionate subject of mine and I think it’s really ingrained in me.”
How did you end up managing the Green Office?
“I worked with them when I was in the student council of the Faculty of Science in 2022. I really liked the initiatives and the projects they were doing. Initially, I applied to become community officer. I had an interview with the previous Green Office team and afterwards they thought I’d be great for the manager position. I think it’s based on how much I know about VU and my experience at NGOs related to the environment and mental health.”
Were you happy with that or did they have to persuade you?
“At first, I was a bit overwhelmed, but that’s because of my young age. Even though I am a bit more experienced than maybe the other students who applied, I still felt that it was a bit out of my reach. But I thought it’s better to accept instead of having this imposter syndrome, so I took the opportunity.”
What do you hope to accomplish during your year at the Green Office?
“What we really want to do is increase our outreach and let students know that we exist. We have a lot of very exciting projects we are working on, but we do need help from student volunteers. With more students we can have a larger impact on making the campus greener.”
Maria Stivala (20)
2024 – now
Manager at Green Office VU
2024 – now
Executive Officer of Sustainability, CSR, and ESG at ST Hotels
2022 – 2024
Teaching Assistant at VU Amsterdam
2022 – 2023
Co-Head of Communications at the Student Council of the Faculty of Science
2021 – 2022
Activity Committee Member at study association STORM
Do you have any personal favourite activities organized by the Green Office?
“I really like the clothing swap that we have at the moment, I love thrift shopping so much! And then I also love the worm hotel on the rooftop.”
The campus just underwent a major transformation, which VU refers to as making the campus greener. Is it green enough for the Green Office?
“It definitely needs to be greener, especially if you look at what was planted: it’s just plain grass – the actual biodiversity is not very rich. The campus would be much nicer with more flowers. The same goes for trees, because a lot were dug up. I know they’re moving some trees from behind the W&N building here, which is very good because growing a tree takes a long time and a lot of energy and resources. If they would do something similar to the botanical garden, it would make the campus even nicer.”
If there were no financial and institutional constraints whatsoever, what would you change on campus?
“I would put solar panels everywhere, especially for electricity which goes to laboratories, because they use the most energy out of all the buildings. I would also put recycling bins everywhere, like I have seen at other universities. Some even have organic bins. The worms would be happy with that for sure.”
You’re a Computer Science student. How does that fit into sustainability?
“What I really like about my master’s is that I can focus on green IT. In my second year I can do a Green Lab course. Generally, throughout my bachelor’s we looked at efficiency, performance and cost, based on things like memory usage, but it wasn’t looked at from a sustainability standpoint. AI uses a lot of energy per prompt and when training each AI model. For my thesis, I observed whether AI that helps software developers with coding is more energy efficient than code solely made by software engineers. Unfortunately, the difference was not significant.”