About one billion tons of general waste is produced worldwide every year. Only about 10% of that is being separated and recycled. The majority of the waste is instead simply stored in waste dumps without any sorting, dumped into rivers and oceans or effortfully incinerated. The resulting toxins and microplastics do not only endanger our environment, but also all of mankind.

We have created a worldwide ecological problem on a dramatic scale that urgently needs to be solved – unfortunately there are few sustainable solutions.

This is mostly due to three reasons:

• Only a few countries have a political focus on ecological problems.
• The technologies for the sustainable processing of waste were not yet mature enough or not yet available.
• The sustainable processing of waste is capital-intensive and the associated investments have so far been risky and not profitable enough.