“You have to realize that waste has its value too”

White sand, turquoise water, coral, palm trees. Berenike Steiger thought she was in paradise on one of the tiny San Blas Islands in the Caribbean Sea. But her image of the dream location off the coast of Panama quickly cracked, with plastic floating everywhere. The sailor was distraught, cleaned up the beach on an island without further ado – and the next morning everything was full of washed-up rubbish again.

A sailing friend and she burned the collected plastic at the time, helplessly, because they saw no other option. "I felt totally powerless. It was bad,” says Berenike Steiger today.

That was in 2018, retrospectively the day changed her life. A spontaneous action became a profession, perhaps more of a vocation. For a year now, Steiger has been the managing director of a company that transforms marine litter into everyday objects. The 41-year-old is in good company with her activities: a number of initiatives and small companies in Hamburg and in the north process marine waste into everyday products, from garbage bags to dog leashes. So that burning is never the only option for piles of garbage again.

Growing up in Lüneburg, Berenike Steiger studied business administration, after which she worked as a marketing manager in Hamburg. But other dreams have always been slumbering. At the age of 16, when asked what she really wanted to do, she answered: "Buy me a sailing boat and sail around the world." Years later, she made her dream come true, she could sail, she had saved money. She sailed around the western Caribbean, where she and her sailing friend Maria LaPointe (42) from Canada became aware of the region's huge plastic problem.

Together with LaPointe she founded the non-profit company "In Mocean", the company is financed by donations and supports people in turning sea garbage into useful objects: things like frisbees, fins, soap dishes. "In Mocean" buys machines that shred polyethylene and polypropylene and turn them into a malleable mass.

The company sets up workshops on site and makes the machines available free of charge. In workshops lasting several months, the locals learn how to operate the devices and find sales channels for the products. The projects are mainly running on the coasts of Costa Rica and Panama, with El Salvador and Mexico to follow soon. A cooperation with the Hamburg furniture manufacturer Jan Cray is also planned for next year.

Because: It is wonderfully clever to talk about avoiding waste if someone else collects your own waste at least every two weeks - and then disappears from the scene according to all the rules of the art of disposal. But what if there is no one who picks up the garbage as a matter of course and on time? And there is only one unregulated dump? "Then," says Berenike Steiger, "you have to realize that waste also has value." And use it differently.

In addition to the woman from Lüneburg, many other people in and around Hamburg have obviously recognized this. For example, her former industry colleagues Madeleine von Hohenthal, 34, and her husband Benjamin Wenke, 37. The two also worked in marketing when they came across so-called ghost nets on a diving holiday off Zanzibar in 2015: old fishing nets that float in the water and are washed up on beaches . Animals often get caught in it.

Seven years later, the couple have turned more than 120 miles of these ghost nets into practical items: bracelets and key rings, gym mat straps, and dog leashes. The nets are recovered by divers from the organizations Healthy Seas and Ghost Diving.

Founded in 2018, Bracenet GmbH, based on Jungfernstieg, now has more than 30 employees, and the products are still manufactured by hand. "We made many decisions that went against profitability," says Madeleine von Hohenthal. “We have always chosen the environment. I never would have thought that we would become so big and that so many companies would rethink so much.”

Because the GmbH has long been advising organizations on the subject of sustainability: for example, how canteens or Christmas presents can be made plastic-free. And business is booming: the company has already donated more than 200,000 euros to initiatives that help clean up the oceans. Latest news: a podcast called "ocean crime" that tells real-life crimes at sea - from illegal plastic dumping and pollution to theft of boats from aid agencies.

Since the end of 2021, "Trash Pick" has been making picks from marine garbage collected on Kiel's beaches. "All we shape" in Lübeck builds, among other things, mini furniture from plastic waste and organizes recycling workshops in schools with mobile devices - including a hand-operated shredder for cranking. The Hamburg-based "Wildplastic" GmbH collects the plastic they recycle on land and not from the sea. After studying media and communication sciences, founder and managing director Christian Sigmund worked for companies such as Google and YouTube abroad until he asked himself: “Is it really the most pressing problem to increase the number of clicks on videos?”

Three years ago, the 33-year-old founded a company with five others with one goal: "We save plastic from the environment in countries without adequate waste systems, process it and recycle it." Partner organizations in Ghana, Haiti, Nigeria, India and others Indonesia collect the plastic waste, it is processed partly on site, partly in Portugal and in the last step in Germany and Belgium: There the waste is appropriately made into garbage bags and also into shipping bags for the Hamburg company "Otto".

This year, "Wildplastic" collects about 250 tons and reuses them. "Of course, the first thing we asked ourselves was how sensible it was to collect rubbish in Africa and take it to Germany," says Christian Sigmund. "But the life cycle assessment was clear: Despite the transport routes, we save 60 percent carbon dioxide compared to new plastic. In addition, there is far less recycled plastic available on the manufacturing market than is needed.”

In the Harburg-Carrée day care center, which is run by the Hamburg Social Institutions for Life with Disabilities, plastic bottle caps and closures are collected. The workers sort the lids by color and type, then they are shredded. "Our employees thus have a meaningful task that deals with current topics and the results of which are tangible," says day care center manager Felix Schulz (34).

The project is called Polymehr, started in 2019 with funding from the Hamburg climate fund and now has cooperation partners from the Technical University of Harburg to the Fab City Hühnerposten initiative, which wants to promote the vision of a local circular economy.

And it goes on: on September 16, the Insel e. V. an open recycling workshop in Lurup. There people can make products from reused plastic - including from the bottle caps sorted in Harburg. It also goes one step further: The Hamburg-based company traceless materials, founded two years ago, develops material alternatives that can be used like plastic, are compostable - and above all free of plastic.