Dreaming is Risky Business

“How far are you willing to go to create the change that you want to see in the world?” That is a question I have asked myself a lot since 2020, but especially over the course of the past 12 months. Alongside that, I have also asked myself: “How much buffer do you need to leave between what you dream of creating and the real risk of going bankrupt?”

I do not come from intergenerational wealth. I am not a trust fund kid. I am not the person you would have expected to study at an Ivy League university or to start a company. I am just the youngest kid of a fairly ordinary middle-class family, and I started working full-time at 22 to pay back my student debt.

After years of working in a law firm, I decided in 2019 that I wanted something more from life. I wanted a chance at doing something that felt meaningful and at finding some degree of happiness. My office job was not delivering on either of those fronts, and I therefore felt like it was time for something new.

In early 2020, I secured a Fulbright Scholarship and a handful of acceptance letters to study law in the U.S. I handed in my notice a few months before the pandemic shut everything down. By May 2020, I was out of a job, no longer had an apartment, and had no clarity on when – or whether or not – I would be heading to New York. It was an emotional and financial wreck to say the least, and the pressure around me mounted to “get back in line” and resume my work in big law. I held my ground though, because I felt like there was nothing meaningful left for me on that path and in firms were female partners were more than rare.

In June 2021, I then finally made my way to New York. A year later, I was awarded an LL.M. from Columbia Law School. Throughout the final months of my degree, people kept asking me: “What law firm are you going to work at after the summer?”. Surely, that was the logical next step. Afterall, who would say no to the prestige of working on the Wall Street and making upwards of $250k a year? It turns out that person was me.

In 2016, I had written my bachelor’s thesis about the role the law played in the planned obsolescence of electronics and the transboundary movement of e-waste. Ever since then, I had known deep-down that e-waste, critical raw materials, and conflict minerals were the issues I wanted to get to play a role in tackling. I figured that, as I had already committed the equivalent to “career suicide” for a lawyer in 2020, I might as well just try to pull that off. That is how The E-Waste Column and The E-Waste Learning Hub were born.

With no funding available anywhere for education on e-waste or the training of employees on electronics lifecycles and supply chains, we self-funded and bootstrapped both initiatives over the past 4 years. Apart from my degree at Columbia Law School, I have never spent more money on anything else than The E-Waste Column and The E-Waste Learning Hub. That maybe sounds wild, but perhaps the authentically crazy part is the unpredictable financial wreck that recent geopolitical shifts got us into.

So, how far am I willing to go to create the change that I want to see in the world? It turns out I risked way more than planned and have gotten much closer to going bankrupt than expected twice on my trajectory since 2020. A global pandemic, the EU’s Omnibus proposals around the Green Deal, and the continuous lack of funding for education on e-waste – in combination with a European Commission that seemingly fails to see the value of startups and SMEs working to push the “green economy” forward – has taught me that dreamers tend to carry the full risk themselves. And when things go wrong, that can be really really bitter, but still not as bitter as having lived a life of “could haves, should haves, would haves”.

The E-Waste Column and The E-Waste Learning Hub are both in need of funding to operate. If you would like to support us, you can do that by buying or donating an annual membership here or making a direct donation here.

This photo is of me in Maastricht on a late summer getaway in 2018, while I was still working as a corporate lawyer and could have never imagined doing what I do now.