Bjorn

Bjorn Hoffmann celebrated his tenth anniversary with Royal HaskoningDHV this year and has been a Senior Environmental Consultant throughout his tenure, while becoming an Environmental Auditor and Professional Natural Scientist.

“I’m the lead when it comes to compliance monitoring,” he says. “I have an environmental auditor’s registration. And I have a few Environmental Control Officers and Auditors that work closely with me. We're not a very big team; we’re only about three or four that can do it now.”

But nowadays, Bjorn spends most of his days dealing with due diligence projects for the international markets. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I wanted to venture off into the international markets and collaborate more with our colleagues in the Netherlands,” he says.

When asked if environmental management is high on project agendas, he says: “It should be.

But it’s one thing being practical and principled, and then another when you’re trying to implement everything you learned while studying. To be practical, you need to start asking questions, like ‘is there a better way to do this?’ but at the same time, you can’t abandon your principles.”

The unspoken traditions that permeate Royal HaskoningDHV have personally meant a lot to Bjorn.

“As an environmentalist, I've really enjoyed being able to mix it up with some of the older engineers. I know they might refer to themselves as dinosaurs, but we've got some amazing people with an abundance of experience whom I've been privileged to be able to rub shoulders with over the years – real, stand-out, good people who care about others; they are really people-centric, and they care about the development of younger people in the organisation, making sure that we get exposure. Some of them have left the company, and it's always sad to see them go, but then it's just a case of realising that somebody will have to take their place, and ultimately have the same mindset they had. So, that's going to have to be me somewhere down the line.”

Bjorn’s favourite project is the first project he worked on for Royal HaskoningDHV.

“It was a project in Lesotho, where I was the Contractor’s Environmental Manager. I was looking after eight environmentalists, and we had 102 construction sites scattered throughout the country. They were all healthcare facilities. The project took us to some amazing places. You can imagine going to these clinics in the middle of nowhere. You’re basically in a 4x4 going up a donkey track to get you to these places, and you think to yourself you're going to a clinic in the middle of nowhere, who does it actually serve? But if you stand there long enough, you see the people streaming down the hillsides walking to the clinic. The end product was incredible; it meant they had potable water, and their medical waste was dealt with properly. I wouldn't say they were state-of-the-art facilities, but it was a beautiful structure. They used a lot of natural sandstone rocks to create features. They had solar panels. It was like a minor miracle that it all came together. It was quite fulfilling to see it at the end of the day.”

When asked what he does outside of work, Bjorn mentions Avos (as in Avocados). A lot.

“My wife says I spend way too much time talking about avocados. During lockdown, I just started growing stuff because we had more time on our hands. I’ve always had a vegetable garden; if I had things, I'd grow them, but I went wild during lockdown. I have at least 40 avocado trees, 70 litchi trees, 30 or so custard apple trees and the same number mango trees. I grew everything! I started grafting my avocado trees too. My wife’s gran (we call her Argie) is 92, and she has this incredible avocado tree in her garden – a Natal Butter avo – and I said it would be such a shame if this tree just died off; it’s something we need to keep in the family.”

“And so, I took cuttings from that tree, and grafted them (a form of propagation) onto my avos. It's basically the same tree except on a different set of roots, so the fruits will be identical to hers. I still don't know what I'm going to do with all these trees,” he laughs. “Maybe they’ll be a side hustle at some point. Although my wife says she’s so sick and tired of hearing about fruit trees or fun or weird facts about trees. She knows way too much for her own liking!”