Two-stage research environmental costs using existing waste and emission statistics

Master's/Bachelor's internship, starting February 2027

Are you the curious researcher who gets energized by data, sustainability, and new insights?
Do you want to make a substantive contribution to the statistics of Statistics Netherlands (CBS)?

This is your challenge

The Dutch cabinet aims for the Netherlands to be fully circular by 2050. To track whether we are meeting this objective, reliable information is needed about, among other things, waste and emissions to water. CBS collects and publishes this data for businesses. We primarily use data from the electronic Environmental Annual Report (e-MJV), supplemented by surveys.

In addition to the amount of waste and water emissions, we also map the environmental costs of businesses, for example, the costs for waste processing and for discharging wastewater. A separate survey is currently used for this. But is that actually necessary?

During your internship, you will investigate whether we can calculate the environmental costs for waste and water emissions using data that is already available. For example, you will combine data on the quantity of waste and discharged water with existing indicators, such as average costs per ton of waste and sector-specific costs per cubic meter of discharged water.

You will, among other things:

• analyze and assess existing data and indicators for usability;

• research which method is most suitable for estimating environmental costs;

• develop a calculation or model that can derive the costs;

• compare the results with the available data from the current survey;

• investigate how reliable and useful the estimates are;

• translate your findings into a concrete recommendation for CBS.

With your research, we aim to determine if we can extract more from existing data and request less from companies. If it turns out that environmental costs can be reliably calculated, the results can also be used to check existing waste and water statistics.

In the most favorable scenario, the separate survey on environmental costs may be partially or entirely discontinued. This means less administrative burden for companies, more efficient use of available data, and potentially more reliable statistics.

This is your internship at CBS The Hague

We welcome you to the Environment sector within the Environment team. With 20 dedicated professionals, we work on environment-related statistics and conduct research on current themes such as climate (change) and the circular economy. We collaborate closely with other teams within CBS.

We work hard on continuously improving our statistics and making the figures available to the public. Examples of recent publications from our team include:

• Companies invested less in the environment in 2024 | CBS

• Nearly 2 percent more business and industrial waste in 2021 | CBS

• Environmental costs and investments of companies | CBS

This is what you bring

You are pursuing a Master's or Bachelor's degree in Environmental Science, Economics, Engineering and Policy Analysis, Data Science, or a related field.

• You have an affinity with the subject of the circular economy.

• You are analytically strong and can structurally investigate complex issues and translate them into clear insights.

• You can program well in R.

• You are socially and communicatively skilled and can clearly convey your ideas and findings to various stakeholders.

As all communication during the internship – both oral and written – takes place in Dutch, a good command of the Dutch language is necessary.

This is what you can expect from us

A great learning environment where you will:

• strengthen your quantitative data analysis competencies by using environmental statistics and economic data sources;

• sharpen your research skills in the areas of the circular economy and life cycle analysis;

• further develop your R programming skills;

• gain experience in interpreting different datasets to create reliable profiles.

For your contribution, you will receive an internship allowance of €800 gross per month (based on 40 hours per week).

Together with your internship supervisor, you will arrange how to work hybrid, with flexible working hours and the option to work on your internship assignment partly from home.

These are our conditions

This is an internship assignment and not a work experience placement. Before starting the internship, we expect you to have an internship supervisor from your educational institution, with whom the internship has been coordinated and concrete learning objectives have been agreed upon.
This internship assignment is intended for students currently enrolled at an educational institution; graduates are not eligible.