How does a passion for plastic transform into a 2000km trip?
An Interview with Clara Bütow, founder of Impact Revolution
Somewhere in Germany between Hamburg and Berlin Clara Bütow is now cycling with a giant flamingo sculpture made out of trash behind her and a big enthusiasm for the events coming up in the capital.
It all started with her podcast for sustainability and social impact, where she interviews experts, inspiring entrepreneurs and creative designers. From this, she learned that between all her hobbies, plastic was her passion.
And soon she took action.
Around half a year ago, she decided to pursue her dreams: raise awareness and find solutions against plastic.
Q: Clara, how did your passion for plastic start?
I was interviewing Hannah Sartin, the founder of Munich’s zero waste store “Ohne”, for my podcast, and her personal story of how she started getting into the zero waste movement when starting a family really touched me. A few hours later on the plane back to Madrid I was still thinking of her, and it suddenly felt weird to me that with all my passion for sustainability, I still hadn’t changed anything about the waste and plastic I consumed. On the metro to my house, I was already googling zero waste stores in Madrid, and before I went to bed, I decided: from tomorrow on, I will live 30 days without plastic.
I was completely unprepared, but nevertheless wanted to share the easy and tough moments with everyone through social media and conversations. My month without plastic ended in just a handful of items that I could not replace or “accidentally” collected (like broken tights, contact lenses, gift wrappers and unwanted straws), and it showed me that despite the surprised reaction of everyone who heard from my experience, it is definitely possible to live without plastic in today’s world, it just takes some adjusting and looking beyond your comfort zone.
A real breaking point for my interest in plastic was when I walked into a normal supermarket just two weeks into my experiment and felt like walking on a landfill: over 90% of products we consume, no matter for what area of our life, are wrapped in plastic. This is when I started researching more about the material, the scope of the problem and the immense acceleration of global plastic production, which will quadruple in the next three decades. For me a clear sign that the time to act is right now!
Q: What made you take action? How was the reception?
I had to share what I was learning about plastic pollution, about the challenges of recycling, the material itself and ways to avoid it, there was no other way.
The reaction to both my experiment and later on also my talks and workshops as well as the Traveling Trash Tour has been incredibly positive, and I am still overwhelmed by the unexpected messages I receive, such as a professor asking me for my DIY toothpaste recipe, high school students taking my initiative to their classroom to help their mates reduce waste, or people on Instagram sending me pictures of clean-ups that I have inspired them to. Every single message warms my heart, and shows me we are on the right track with Impact Revolution.
Q: Tell us about 3 persons who inspired you in this journey
Rob Greenfield, who walked through NY with his trash suit carrying 1 month of waste on his body; Dhruv Boruah, who is cycling ON the water to collect waste and raise awareness for plastic pollution; and Lauren Singer for making zero waste cool, attractive and also being a young female multiple entrepreneur for sustainability!
Q: What changed inside you during the Future of Waste program you followed with makesense?
I could deepen my knowledge about the circular economy, blue economy, biomimicry, material loops and all those wonderful principles for creating a world where there is no waste, just circulations of material. One of the most important aspects of the program were meeting other people that were as passionate for trash and the environment as myself, having a community where we could support each other, exchange ideas and feedback and inspire one another to mobilize our local communities.
Q: Tell us a bit more about Impact Revolution and the Travelling Trash Tour, how did you dare to do this crazy idea?
Impact Revolution was born out of the desire and impatience to finally “do something”. Although I have pretty much always been involved in some sort of social initiative, university council, student organisation and more, it never felt to me that I was doing enough to really change those around me and have a impact. I wanted to create something where I could really add value, and start changing the world for the better, as mainstream as this may sound.
In May 2017, I decided to pause for a month and make my desire to start my own initiative more seriously, so I signed up for an online course that promised you’d be able to start your own startup within a month. Starting with being aware for my passions, my strengths, weaknesses and core interests, I went to visualizing the impact I wanted to have and developing different possible models until deciding that for now, a podcast would be my ideal outlet and a great chance to network and connect to all those people that inspired me the most! I never finished the course, because after three weeks I was already so involved in Impact Revolution that my whole time went into the podcast creation and the launch right in the next month!
Once Impact Revolution was born, I decided very intuitively which projects I wanted to do, and quickly expanded it to social media channels as well as offline events. I found out that I love public speaking and facilitating workshops, often in collaboration with makesense, which I was also leading in Madrid at the time.
The Traveling Trash Tour is a combination of my passion for plastic and the dream to do a long distance bike trip, that I wanted to create in the most open and collaborative way possible. The sculpture gives me a creative and funny way to communicate a serious problem without even opening a mouth, while the biking and our events make it possible for anyone to participate, and also help us to connect local changemakers with one another.
Of course it was not easy to take the step to start the Traveling Trash Tour, especially when you graduate from a business school and everyone around you is competing for those corporate consulting jobs while you are just planning a crazy campaign like this. There were endless moments of doubt, of going for the “normal” and “easy” way of taking a job, situations of “I cannot do this”, or people telling me that this was way too little time to organize what I wanted to do. Every time I went out to announce publicly that I wanted to do this tour, or launched the crowdfunding took me a huge amount of guts and “jumping over my shadow” as we say in Germany, but I am so incredibly glad I overcame all my fears and am doing what I do at the moment. This is by far the greatest project I have done in my whole life, and I am so insanely passionate for it every single day. I still can’t believe the interest the project is capturing, the fantastic team that I can now work with and the impact we are having with the tour. Best decision ever!
Q: What are you seeing now in the road?
Lots and lots of initiatives that change the future of plastic! We are learning insanely much in events and visits of the initiatives, and documenting it all as well as we can on our newly launched platform.
Q: Is raising awareness enough? What can do citizens to take action?
It always starts with awareness! We should all begin with assessing our own life, and realizing that in the end it is our daily decisions that shape the world we live in. I know for a fact that often just leading by example and showing those around you what we can do differently is a very easy but incredibly powerful way of sparking change in behaviour. Nevertheless, I would encourage anyone with a passion to dare to go further, and start your own changemaking campaign, social startup or organization. One of my biggest learnings is to just start doing and do not wait for things to be perfect — if I had done that, I would probably only start cycling three years from now. Reach out to those that have done something similar to your idea, get help from the community and never be afraid of the skills you do not have yet, you will get them on the way! You already are a changemaker, so go and realize your project!
Q: And to end, what are your plans for the expansion of Impact Revolution?
The tour has given an incredible boost to Impact Revolution, and has made me get a lot clearer on possible future scenarios for the organization. Talking to so many initiatives on the way, I was able to do a great amount of research to figure out what kind of solutions we need to change the future of plastic and best support the changemakers and solutions that are already out there. I am still in this exploration phase, but absolutely certain that we want to keep working on plastics and the circular economy.
As my team has expanded to six additional members, we are now building on a platform that presents initiatives changing the future of plastic in Europe so we can serve as a directory, but also inspire individuals and connect changemakers with one another. Of course, we want to keep facilitating and participating in events, as well as keep our social media platforms filled with inspiration and when I have more time, I would love to continue with the podcast, too.
Once the tour is over, I will evaluate the data collected with my team, and decide how to realign Impact Revolution so we can best solve common limitations and challenges of plastic changemakers that currently keep them from scaling. There are quite a few options out there at the moment that range from support during the funding phase over educational campaigns, knowledge-sharing platforms, conferences up to consultancy services.
Find out more:
- Join us for our tour events, come and participate!!! All the info is in our Facebook page 🚴 ♻️
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- Do you know cool initiatives??? We want to showcase them in HERO INTITIATIVES 🆒!
- Listen to our podcast 🎧 and comment!
- Do you want to be part of the team ?? We are searching for passionate sustainability writers for our Blog 📝 (email: elisa@impactrevolution.eu)
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