No, it’s. It’s new. It’s new. It’s four years old now, but I bought it. New. Yeah.
Um, when is the one adjective that comes to mind when you think about car electronics?
Car electronics, as in the electronic devices in the cars. I don’t like them. Me, personally. That’s why I bought a Skoda. Fabia. I like simple cars. I like small cars. I like manual gear shifting. And that’s why I bought a very, very simple new car. I don’t like that much electronics in my car.
Um, in your opinion, are cars that include electronic components easier or harder to adapt to circular economy principles than regular cars like your car?
Well, looking at it from a naive point of view, as a non mechanic, I’d say it’s probably difficult, more difficult to to to realise circular to adapt electronic cars to circular economy. Yeah. I mean we all know the problems a normal desktop PC poses in recycling. It’s hard to get everything sorted again. I mean, now look at the car. I mean there are computers nowadays. They are running, they’re driving computers. So it’s, yeah, it’s a problem.
Uh, what can the automotive industry do to promote circular economy or do you believe that the automotive industry is already doing these things?
I think they’re looking into it. That’s at least that’s what they keep telling me whenever I ask them at trade fairs. But let’s face it, they live from developing and selling ever new models of their existing cars. So every other year you have a new version of the car you just bought and you think, Oh, my car is old, let’s get a new one, unless there is a sort of take back routine. Whereas the car manufacturers find a reason to take back cars because they reuse materials, because it’s actually, let’s say metal is so expensive on a world market that it pays to get your old cars back and reuse the material that maybe there is an option. It always depends on the it hinges on the economic perspective. That’s why we as a company, we we try to make sure that we link to the economic, to the social, to the to the the environmental, to the social, to the economic aspect of sustainability. Because if you if you if you meet all three aspects, then you actually find solutions for many, many problems that we face today.
If they don’t, do you have any concerns about privacy and personal data stored, for example, by car electronics like GPS or in electronics in general?
I’m not a friend of it. No, I don’t know. Maybe it’s my mentality. I’ve been born in 1981 and I still remember the time we didn’t have any mobile phones. And let’s say I haven’t quite adapted to the digital age yet. So yeah, I wouldn’t mind. I mean, if I can trust whoever is storing the data and whoever is using the data, if there really is trust, if there is a means to control what they do and if there’s an institution guarding it and if that institution is independent and trustworthy and so on, you see what I’m getting at, then yes, I wouldn’t have a problem. The question is who is using my data for what and can whoever access it? But then it opens the door for for malpractice. And that’s what that’s I wouldn’t like that. So no, I’m not I’m not a fan of the Chinese solution, but I wouldn’t mind offering up my data in order to enable better infrastructures. But that. Has to come with the trust aspect. You know.
does recycling and reusing mean the different things to you.
Uh, reuse for me is putting something to a different use. Recycling for me is taking things apart and feeding them into the production cycle again, right? I mean that’s, that’s more a theoretical distinction, I guess.
How much responsibility does each individual have to make lifestyle and consumer choices that help protect the environment?
Um, let’s say one person can save the world. A society can. So it’s for me, it’s a societal question, brings me to administration, brings me to legislation, brings me to nudging, finding the right structures so that a society on the whole can be sustainable individually. That conflicts with my idea of of what we still call free will free choice and individual freedom.
On a scale of 1 to 5, one means not at all concerned and five means extremely concerned. How concerned are you about issues of environmental waste and pollution?
generally And ever since I was a kid. Five, so very concerned. Um, at the same time, I am a believer of sanity and rationality and I see how much has changed. I come from Eastern Germany and I remember the, the stench of our environment, the and I know much has changed and I’ve seen improvement. So thinking on a wider scale now, the question is how can we prevent that from ever happening again and how can we make what we do today better? I mean, thinking of emissions and stuff, CO2.
What, if any, actions do you take in your life to promote sustainability?
I don’t travel much. I, but not because I don’t want to harm the environment just because I like doing stuff locally. So don’t really think about it, to be honest. I’m not a consumerist, so it just goes along with my lifestyle. I don’t really sort of buy new stuff all the time. This jacket is six years old, for example, but I don’t consciously follow any sort of regime to save the planet.
Do you see the circular economy as a local or national or international issue?
It depends on the use context, depends on the circle you’re looking at on the are you looking at production cycles? Are you looking at consumption cycles? Are you looking at gastronomy, agriculture? So all of all of those. But depending on what you’re looking at, are you looking at production, nutrition, travel, whatever the sourcing of materials is global. So you’re looking global restaurants and how they supply themselves is a regional factor. Unless they buy fruit from further abroad, which incidentally is actually much more environmentally friendly through the scale effect, then sourcing it from your neighbor. Maybe. But you know what I’m getting at.
Okay. Thank you very much.