Around 80 per cent of ocean plastic arrives there via rivers. Plastic Fischer works at that point: they take it out before it reaches the mouth. We support them in doing so.
What Plastic Fischer does
Plastic Fischer is a company founded in Cologne in 2019. It runs eight sites in India and Indonesia - among them Varanasi, Kanpur, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Bandung on the Citarum, one of the most polluted rivers in the world.
The device is called a TrashBoom: a floating barrier made from standard plastic piping with a rigid steel mesh reaching 50 centimetres below the surface. Deliberately a mesh and not a net, so fish do not get caught - they pass underneath. The modules chain together to fit any river width.
Two decisions there strike us as notable. First, the TrashBoom is built on site from locally available materials - no imports, no special parts. Second, the construction manual is freely available; the company does not sell the technology, it gives it away.
What happens to the plastic
Plastic Fischer names what many would leave out:
Only 5% of the non-organic material that we collect can actually be recycled as most of the valuable plastic is already collected by the informal waste sector. Most of the plastic we fisch out of rivers is single-use-plastic that is not designed to be part of a circular economy.
What is collected is roughly half moisture, a quarter organic material - which goes back into the river - and a quarter non-organic. What cannot be recycled goes to co-processing in cement plants, replacing coal. Plastic Fischer calls that the better alternative to landfill, not recycling.
That openness is what decided it for us. Anyone who says “only 5 per cent” when “we recycle river plastic” would sell better is serious about it.
Impact instead of greenwashing
We are convinced by effect, not by promises. This is not about easing a conscience; it is about plastic coming out of the water - and that is exactly what our partnership pays for.
Plastic Fischer sees it the same way, and says it more plainly than most:
We do not offer any off-setting or compensation service. A partnership with us means contributing outside your supply chain, not replacing your duty to reduce your own footprint.
So we call ourselves “plastic neutral” nowhere. What we can say is more concrete: one euro corresponds to one kilogram of river plastic collected, measured as dry weight after sorting. A figure you can check, rather than a badge that costs nothing.
How we work together
Plastic Fischer applies the same standard to how it works as to what it does, and chose us on that basis when it came to redesigning and building their new website.
That puts us on both sides of it: we build the site they use to explain and fund their work, and we support the work itself.
