A bag tidies up

At the Wildplastic office in Hamburg’s Speicherstadt district, there is a large bag full of colourful granules. It is the raw material for rubbish bags made from recycled plastic, the Wildbags. But before co-founder Chris Sigmund can take out the rubbish, there is a long way to go from Asia, Africa or the Caribbean via Portugal to Germany.

Especially when travelling through poorer countries, it is impossible to close one’s eyes to all the plastic waste. It gets caught in bushes, piles up in villages or floats on a river towards the ocean. Wildplastic is helping to make things a little cleaner. People who live in these places collect the plastic and hand it over to a local collection organisation that cooperates with Wildplastic. The waste collectors receive a fixed amount for each kilogramme. “They often live on the outskirts of the city and earn a living from occasional work. Collecting waste is a reliable alternative because our project partners don’t just accept the material today, they will in the future as well. And unfortunately there is no shortage of waste,” says Sigmund. In some places, this has resulted in self-organised mini-waste collection, and the waste is even collected at home or at central locations. Initiatives like this prevent plastic from ending up in the environment in the first place.

Plastic dominates our everyday lives and, even here in Germany, not all plastic waste is recycled. A large part is incinerated and thus serves to generate energy. Around 11 per cent is shipped abroad; in 2021, this amounted to 766,000 tonnes. This makes Germany the biggest exporter of plastic waste in the EU. And even though Asian countries in particular are now restricting import volumes, a great deal of solid waste still ends up in Malaysia, where there is no adequate recycling structure. Instead, there are vast quantities of plastic packaging for drinking water or takeaway food.

Chris Sigmund has seen for himself how overwhelming the problem is. On a trip through Peru, a hurricane devastated the country. A mud avalanche slid down the mountain, taking an illegal landfill with it. The rubbish stood waist-high in the village. His six co-founders had also seen huge mountains of rubbish in Asia or gathered washed-up plastic on Spanish beaches. With the founding of Wildplastic they decided to “start the plastic vacuum cleaner together”, as he said, laughing.

The founding team chose a special legal form for the enterprise; Wildplastic follows the steward-ownership model. It cannot be sold or restructured contrary to the original purpose, for example, to produce rubbish bags from virgin plastic in future. All profits are reinvested and not disbursed to the owners. Like most start-ups, Wildplastic also requires external financial support in the first few years. This comes from impact investors who are also behind the project – but they do not have voting rights.

Companies like Wildplastic that pursue environmental and social goals are making visible changes. In addition, they can trigger grassroots movements and encourage others to find new solutions to existing problems. They are also often well networked with each other and form partnerships. For example, Wildplastic works with everwave to collect plastic in Cambodia, and the packaging for Goldeimer toilet paper is made from its wild plastic. When Chris Sigmund is asked about the long-term goals, he doesn’t think long: “It may be utopian, but I want a world where business ideas like ours are not necessary.”