Kategorie: News
Initiative against plastic waste on land and in the sea
We are making progress! Together with Tauchsport Gläßer, we provided information at the f.re.e trade fair and communicated the idea of ‘sitting on rubbish – learning on rubbish’. Over the five days of the fair, around 500 people visited our stand and listened to information about the project. Some were interested, some were fascinated and many were concerned.
Report by Gerald Nowak
The Mama Earth project, which had its own stand at f.re.e 2025 in Munich, collected a total of 50 new school chairs for pupils in the Philippines. The chairs themselves are made from collected plastic waste that would otherwise harm the environment.
The collection campaign at the Tauchsport Gläßer coffee stand and the collection box alone yielded a good 30 chairs. The rest were purchased directly by visitors via the MAMA EARTH website.
Thanks to Torsten Gläßer (Divesport Gläßer), the team and Messe München for making this campaign possible. The Filipino children, who can now learn in comfort and provide a better future for their families, thank you!
How the project came about
As a diver who has had his head under water since his youth and has been taking photographs there for what feels like an eternity, I have witnessed how the flood of plastic in our oceans is increasing year after year. Whether in tropical waters or the cool oceans of the polar regions. Plastic is now everywhere. It is worst in tropical waters, where people live who have little and even make a living from recycling our consumer goods. But poverty also contributes to the flood of plastic. In countries where the majority of the population are day labourers, industry offers incredibly tiny packaging units for sale. Ready-made noodle soup in single portions for daily use, detergent for one wash, mini bags of crisps for a few seconds of enjoyment, and hundreds of similarly tiny packages. Since people in these countries are not focused on tomorrow and future generations, they live in the here and now. No matter what they are doing to the future of their planet. Open goods, as they were available just a few years ago, are now hardly available – the international big industry is too powerful, suggesting to people that everything is better this way. Similar to here, there is almost nothing left that is not packaged in plastic. But where to put all this plastic? How can the earth cope with all this waste? Soon there will be more plastic in the water than fish swimming in it. Even now, there is practically no fish in the sea that does not already contain microplastics, and we eat this with every bite of ‘healthy fish from the sea’.
Not so long ago, I was on one of my trips to Davao on the island of Mindanao, which is located in the south-east of the Philippines. A good friend of mine lives and works here. Uli Kronberg is a German publisher of one of the most renowned sailing magazines. PALSTEK is a German-language magazine for sailors who want to know everything about their sport, down to the last detail. A study trip once took Uli to the Philippines, where he found love and stayed longer and longer each year. More than 25 years ago, he noticed that the coastline there had a problem. Mangroves had been cleared everywhere. However, mangroves are essential to the tropics. The trees protect the coasts from storms, provide a breeding and nursery ground for countless marine animals and are also one of the most perfect CO2 stores there is. Mangroves store 3-5 times as much CO2 as tropical rainforests and at the same time protect the coasts from erosion by breaking waves. With each visit, fewer mangroves could be found, and reforestation became the main project of the MAMA EARTH FOUNDATION.
Over the years, he has also changed people's attitudes towards the environment. Uli has turned former day labourers into planters. Fishing families now earn money by planting trees instead of cutting them down. The project has now grown out of its infancy and many people are involved. I saw for myself what has become of the original one-man project. A good 4 million new mangroves have been planted, countless tonnes of plastic collected, hundreds of chairs produced, thousands of turtles raised and many other environmental projects incorporated. The sub-project ‘School chairs made from rubbish’ has now become my passion project. It can be explained in a few words: the collected plastic is recycled in a rudimentary way and, by heating the plastic, a chair is pressed into shape using pressure and a mould. This chair gives a child the opportunity to go to school and learn. The children learn how important it is to preserve their world and to take care of it. Only through education can we ensure that people understand this and know how to implement it in their everyday lives.
If you would like to find out more, please feel free to contact me: g.nowak@cr-photo.de
WHY IS THERE MAMA EARTH? How it all began.
We humans have already severely damaged our habitat, the Earth, and in some places destroyed it. Often out of ignorance, but frequently also just to make a quick profit, without considering the catastrophic consequences. We tend to overlook the fact that we have descendants and that humanity needs this one Earth for its continued existence and needs the planet to be in a viable condition. We cannot assume that the planet will recover on its own as long as we are here and continue to overexploit the environment.
The world's population is still growing rapidly, from around 300 million people a thousand years ago to almost 8.1 billion in 2025, despite all efforts to stop the ‘population explosion’. More people need more space, more food, more of everything. This means that we are rapidly consuming raw materials in ever-increasing quantities.
This exploitation of resources requires a global concept if we want to have any chance of avoiding collapse. However, there is no quick and easy solution to make everything better. The connections that keep the ‘Earth organism’ alive are too complex. No study, no matter how elaborate, can outline the necessary steps that are necessary and sensible in terms of environmental protection and the sustainable development of our planet. But if we don't all think about our own environmental footprint and start acting in a sustainable way, we will inevitably fail. Doing nothing would be the worst possible course of action. The more people change their behaviour and stop consuming resources unnecessarily, the better our chances are of seeing positive change.
Even though humans have done a lot wrong in the past, they also have the power to do a lot for the good of our planet. Because MAMA EARTH puts people at the centre of its thinking, its priority is clear: First and foremost, humans need air to breathe, at least 10,000 litres per day. Clean air is therefore a priority above all other needs. To produce the oxygen we need to breathe, we need plants and trees, which we in turn ‘feed’ with the air we breathe out, i.e. carbon dioxide. Trees and forests produce abundant oxygen, so we need more of them. A mature tree can supply at least ten people with air to breathe. Here is a fitting quote from Prof. Dr. Jörn Wittern:
'A deciduous tree produces 2 kilograms of Oxygen in one hour, a human consumes 2 kilograms of Oxygen per day, every litre of petrol that powers an engine or a turbine consumes 2 kilograms of Oxygen!'
THE BEGINNINGS OF MAMA EARTH
Mama Earth has been a registered association for more than 25 years.
In the early years, the main focus was on ending drift net fishing, the fur trade and factory farming. The people behind MAMA EARTH did not point fingers, but went to the people, farmers and fishermen to educate them. It was hard work, but it paid off.
As part of the project to distribute the SK 16 solar cooker (now the Parabolkocher 100), Uli Kronberg came into direct contact with the global shortage of wood and the alarming rates of deforestation. These experiences significantly changed the association's goals.
Since then, MAMA EARTH has focused entirely on reforestation while providing assistance to the local people. Because nature conservation and economic development are not mutually exclusive. The first project was the successful planting of over a million mangroves, which have now grown to almost 4 million. And it continues every day: mama-earth.eco/
This is MAMA EARTH today
With this success behind it, further tree projects – including commercial ones – were added. Today, MAMA EARTH offers a well-thought-out package in the areas of teak and mahogany.
The association has now been a foundation for ten years and is currently undertaking further reforestation projects, such as the large ‘myTree project’. Here too, MAMA EARTH does not simply try to collect donations, as many organisations do. This is because, with a mere donation, how and where the money is used is usually based purely on trust in the organisation. Whether the money actually reaches its destination and what percentage is invested in the internal structures and advertising of the organisations are the driving and enduring questions.
That is why Mama Earth always offers personal support for specific projects. For example, anyone who buys a tree from ‘myTree’ receives the exact coordinates of THEIR tree on a photo and can see where it has been planted on Google Earth. Google Earth will take every donor directly to THEIR tree once they have entered the coordinates: mama-earth.eco/mytree/
Anti-plastic campaigns
The planters at MAMA EARTH are confronted with plastic waste on land and in the sea every day. Due to the ongoing pollution of the oceans, plastic waste is increasingly getting caught in the root systems of the mangroves, where it is collected by the planters for a little extra money. If the plastic remains in the sea, it suffocates the young mangrove seedlings or is ground down into microplastics. These microplastics are then eaten by marine animals and enter the human food chain. The inevitable question that arises is: ‘What to do with the collected plastic?’ Fishing it out of the sea and then dumping it on land is not a solution. The next storm would carry it back into the sea. So, after collection, the plastic is sorted by type and taken to the recycling factory in Davao. The recycling company Envirotech uses it to make sturdy school chairs with a 10-year guarantee. The sturdy and durable chairs were specially designed for schools and have a small table integrated into the armrest. They are made from approximately 12 kilograms of marine debris. A school chair costs 38 euros and is an ideal solution for the tropical climate, where chairs made of cheap wood do not have a long life expectancy. Uli and his team then distribute the chairs to schools on Mindanao. The project is currently limited to this Philippine island, but there is already a lot of interest in expanding it to the whole country. Perhaps even to the whole of Asia. With your support, it can work. By spreading the word, the project will continue to grow and become more successful.
SCHOOL CHAIRS MADE FROM PLASTIC WASTE
Cost per chair: £38.00
Learning on rubbish: mama-earth.eco/produkt/mama-earth-schulstuehle/
Please support this campaign. For just €38, the plastic is collected, transported for recycling, pressed into a chair and delivered to a school. Each child even receives school supplies and pens for a year. MAMA EARTH reports on everything related to the school chairs in its monthly work reports, as well as on other campaigns and innovations.
AVOIDING WASTE TO PROTECT SEA TURTLE BREEDING GROUNDS
MAMA EARTH has a long-standing friendship with the AMIHAN SA DAHICAN GROUP in Mati, which also supplies plastic waste that has been washed up on these beaches. Keeping this stretch of beach clean is vital for the survival of sea turtles, as they lay their eggs on Dahican Beach on many nights. It is important that the mother turtles do not have to fight their way through the rubbish to dig their nests, but also that the return journey is barrier-free when the animals are completely exhausted. And it is particularly important that the hatched young can quickly return to the sea and do not get tangled up in the plastic waste. To help, MAMA EARTH has cloth bags made from used plastic bags. A carrier bag costs £4.
Zero Hero: A lot can be made from rubbish, but the priority must be to avoid plastic waste. That's why it's important to take a critical look at ourselves every day and avoid single-use packaging wherever possible. No one can do this perfectly, but if we try to produce only half as much rubbish, we've taken the first step.
This new campaign is being launched in cooperation with the school in Mati, where pupils buy and throw away disposable drinking bottles in large quantities because their parents cannot afford tumblers (stainless steel drinking bottles) that keep the water cool and fresh. Plastic drinking bottles are not allowed on the school premises. This is where MAMA EARTH comes in.
The school will be equipped with water dispensers where pupils can fill up their water bottles for free. This will save thousands of plastic bottles a year, which will also ease the strain on parents' household budgets and benefit the environment.
Here, too, YOU can help to gradually expand the campaign. If you would like to help, you can buy a tumbler for a donation of £6. This money will also be donated directly and in full by MAMA EARTH to students in the Philippines: https://mama-earth.eco/produkt/tumbler/
Thank you for your support. We have already supported several classes ourselves.
Sibylle Gerlinger and Gerald Nowak
More information:
mama-earth.eco/produkt/mama-earth-schulstuehle