Workshop on Chemical Safety

We hosted a workshop on Chemical Safety last Tuesday in Loods M for our Learning Community Energy Transision Lab Maassluis. No, nothing exploded. That was kind of the whole point.

Our special guest Marco van den Berg — incident prevention and control officer at Veiligheidsregio Rotterdam-Rijnmond — brought a wealth of real-world experience to the room. He explained how the energy transition brings a range of unknown problems and risks to the table, which is a huge extra challenge for firefighters nowadays.

Walking students through everything from hydrogen's invisible flame and extreme flammability range, to leak detection, safe storage, and emergency response systems, together we learned more about what to pay close attention to in our designs 👀

After the lecture, the Learning Community students applied safety thinking directly to their own projects, with Marco on hand to offer his expert input. It was a great reminder that safety and secure design aren't an afterthought — they're what makes innovation actually viable in the real world.

For a topic that often gets skipped in early-stage design, the room was engaged, the questions were sharp, and the conversations carried well past the end time. 💡

Thank you Marco for an eye-opening afternoon!