Plastic bottles, toys, electronic waste: every year, millions of tons of trash end up in the ocean worldwide. Our partner everwave has taken up the fight against this threatening flood—with remarkable success.
The young social start-up has been working tirelessly to protect our waters for five years now. Around the world, everwave's CollectiX waste collection boats, supported by operations on the riverbanks, clean up particularly polluted rivers of plastic waste – so that it doesn't even reach the oceans in the first place.
Trash knows no boundaries
As one of everwave's earliest partners and sponsors, the Landmarken family is on board. Our first joint project, the deployment of a waste collection boat on the Danube in Serbia, was followed by several others. The team has long been operating worldwide, because waste knows no boundaries. Since March 2022, our boat, the "Moringa by Landmarken," has been operating in Cambodia, where everwave is running its longest and largest project to date. The team is working hard to clean up the Mekong River and its tributaries and recycle the waste in a material recovery facility they built themselves.
The Mekong is a gigantic river and a lifeline for millions of people. The most common types of waste collected by our Landmarken waste collection boat include plastic, glass, metal, rubber, textiles, electronic waste, bulky waste, toxic substances, and more. The everwave team has collected an incredible 1,300,000 kilograms of waste since the start of the initiative – an achievement made possible by people who live in the area. Involving the local population and creating long-term jobs are among everwave's principles: from project managers to waste sorters, all employees are from Cambodia. Many of them were previously unemployed and living below the poverty line.
To experience the magnitude of the challenge with all their senses, the family of our founder Norbert Hermanns and our CEO Anke Tsitouras traveled to Cambodia and lent a hand themselves. This film shows the impressions they took home with them.
"We knew beforehand that meaningful work was being done here. But now that we've seen it for ourselves, we realize that the challenge is much greater than we thought."
Norbert Hermanns, Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Landmarken AG
"The task of making our buildings, our offices, and our POHA houses more plastic-free is something we are taking away with us from here."
Anke Tsitouras, CEO of Landmarken AG and co-founder of POHA House