Everyone's responsibility: How Finland is raising a generation of environmental ‘experts’

HELSINKI, Finland — A biologist, a physicist and an engineer one day walk into a room with a wild idea: to create food out of thin air.

They will do so, only after they get help from a food scientist, a recipe tester, and a marketing professional — people who likely would have never crossed paths with the biologist, the physicist and the engineer, if not for a shared goal of making the impossible happen.

There may be few shared skills between a physicist and an artist, a chef and a chemist. But this bold collaboration across disciplines has paved the way for Finnish startup Solar Foods to create the world’s first alternative protein from renewable energy and carbon dioxide with only 1% of the environmental impact of animal agriculture.

Finland’s race to net zero by 2035 — one of the most ambitious climate targets in the developed world — has prompted several companies in different industries to innovate and adopt circular economy practices so the goods they produce don’t generate heaps of waste.

But it’s not just a culture of problem-solving in Finland — a country similar in size to the Philippines but with a population 20 times smaller — that has allowed companies like Solar Foods to turn a thought experiment into a concrete solution to help save the planet. 

Finland’s education system emphasizes the importance of sustainability from day one — literally as early as kindergarten. And thanks to recent initiatives, circular economy practices are being taught across levels and among working professionals, so that circularity is practiced in “widely different sectors in distinct and specific ways,” Tuuli Hietaniemi of the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra told Philstar.com. 

Indeed, for Solar Foods’ CEO Pasi Vainikka, it’s people crossing disciplines to create “disrupting solutions” that will help address increasingly finite resources and the climate crisis.

The Finnish environmental ministry has identified overconsumption of natural resources as one of its main challenges to sustainable development, said Minister Kai Mykkänen. 

It would take four planets to sustain humanity if everyone on the planet consumed at Finland's levels, much higher than the Philippines’