WASTER — an unexpected journey

Written by Jonáš Verner

One day me and Diego Tirado, my colleague whom I came to know just in the beginning of autumn 2020 were working on our first assignment. We did not know much about each other and since the lockdown came earlier than we expected, we hardly have ever met. So this was the beginning of a journey through the course of Dare to Challenge. Frankly, at that time, we did not dare to challenge anything more than usual. We were just surfing on the internet, searching for something interesting to focus on. I just finished my water and as I was not sure about the recycling in Greece in general I was about to throw it into the trash. Diego stopped me:

• Don’t do it!
• Why?
• I can use yours.
• Why don’t you buy a new one?
• It’s reusable and i’ll save some money for later.

Then it got me. One man’s waste is another man’s treasure… I gave him the bottle and we returned to work as if nothing had happened. But the quote stayed with me — if people communicated more they would produce less waste. Everyone has different needs and the sharing culture is already really strong… Sharing cars, motorbikes, peer to peer lending, crowdsourcing, sharing tools… Why don’t people also share waste?

One man’s waste is another man’s treasure. This quote was the starting quote in implementing an idea on waste reduction. After the beginning of our work together I realized that we shared a vision of how we want the world to be. With the first projects like the 5 why’s and #theworldwewant I started thinking that we care about people, life itself and how some times people have to much trouble having a descent and a nice life. So the idea started emerging.

Then after some discussion about what the main problem is and where we should start acting we settled around the topic of environment. We care about people, we care about life and the environment is the key that holds those two things together, so we decided to act on that.

As we are Erasmus students here in Athens, our first action was to send a letter to the mayor of Athens, sharing our concern about the pollution situation in Athens. Time passed and the letter had no response. Of course? Who will care about two random guys complaining? we decided to act ourselves. At perfect timing, MILweek came, giving us the energy and the motivation that we need for acting from ourselves.

Just some brief numbers from EuroSTAT: 6000 tons of waste are produced every day, which equals 2 million tons a year. More than 70 per cent of this waste ends up in landfills, some illegal, only around 20 per cent is recycled.

So, we established WASTER, an information hub on waste production, recycling and re-selling. The year 2020 was the year of e-commerce and WASTER is overseeing this fact. That’s why we started with an idea of waste e-commerce platform. WASTER‘s first goal wasto improve our planet by focusing on protecting the environment. We thrive for circular economy — what has once been used, can be used again. We want to help create a space in which waste is not an issue but a solution.

We set startups and bigger companies which produce things (and therefore waste) as our target group. We also set multiple accounts on social network such as Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and started to communicate our ideas to the world.

So we want to reach as many people as it is possible, but we cannot just send messages like screaming to the air and let everybody hear. We need to be smart. We don’t want just people to hear us, we want them to understand us and to like us, the thing is that the targets don´t understand in the same way the messages that we tell, so we share different types of posts depending on the platform and depending on the target, so you can go check and see it by yourselves and maybe you will fall in love with the idea as much as we are.

After all the work that we have done together, we are really proud of the project´s evolution. We learned how to adapt to the public and how to sell an idea, but most importantly we learned that trying to make people believe in us is the hardest thing ever. One man’s waste is another man’s treasure.