I joined Start Campus with something you rarely get before you commit: the chance to see the specific choices and the active projects before deciding whether to believe the story. Having decided to move back to Portugal not long before, I knew quickly that I had chosen well.
Part of what convinced me was how much was already underway. Seawater cooling built on the intake infrastructure of a decommissioned power plant, alongside closed-loop systems.
HVO as an early and live choice for the backup generators. Habitat restoration running since the start. Engineering decisions made with low water withdrawal and energy efficiency in mind, and community work with names attached to it. A campus planned around where it actually sits, with tangible work being delivered. And despite this, I did not expect it to feel this close.
For most of my career, environmental impact arrived as a spreadsheet. Projections, scenarios, measurements, benchmarks, programs running across continents and measured in years, with real results at the end of them. But there was always distance between a decision and the thing it affected.
You modelled the impact but rarely put a foot in it. It is a welcome and energizing contrast. That proximity works twice over, to the work and to home, and that is what makes it worth doing: the decisions are being made now, in rooms I sit in, about a campus still being built.
Our first Sustainability Update covers an early stage of operations, in a deliberately lighter format, and begins to connect those threads. Working on it gave me a chance to see those connections more clearly. The report brings together choices made over many years, from engineering and environmental management to community investment, and links them to what we can measure today.
It also reflects something I value deeply: being transparent not only about progress, but also about what we are still learning, measuring and working to improve. This is the first year of a longer story, and I am glad to be reporting it from here.
________________________________________
Rita Monteiro is Head of Sustainability at Start Campus, developer of the 1.2 GW SINES Data Campus in Portugal. She recently returned home after years across Japan, France, the UK and the UAE, the last eight of them in sustainability at Amazon and in heavy industry. At Amazon, she built the sustainability function in Japan, ran the global Net Zero programme and, most recently, led sustainable construction, energy and partnerships across the Middle East, Africa and Asia.