The challenge: Come up with a moonshot idea to help mitigate climate change (+ it must have a positive impact on 1 billion people). Easy.
I sat down and did a quick brainstorm. Solving climate change is not really my domain, as most my ideas are oriented towards people and how we can improve their lives. I looked into the meat industry, and how much resources it actually takes to produce one patty. Then I looked into plastic pollution and especially ocean plastics, and how it affects our world. It is such a great initiative to clean up the ocean for plastics, but it does not really solve the problem we have with platics today. We need to dig deeper and talk about human behavior in terms of usage, consumption, and disposal of it.
I clearly remember the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh and in Kathmandu, Nepal, where all the trash is just laying around in the streets. It was really terrible. I needed to solve that problem, but how? I spent quite some time to come up with a sustainable for-profit model! I came up with the idea Trashnology – an incentivized waste management system. People in developing countries collect trash in the streets and get paid per kilo for the waste collected! Not only do we clean up the streets, we also try to nudge people and incentivize them to recycle/clean up for money! We do it to some extent in Denmark with our deposit on plastic bottles. What if… we could use the same model in developing countries and on other plastics too!
I believe this is an idea that can impact our environment and help millions of people in developing countries. I now have my idea for Danske IDéer, now I just need a lot of data and validation from Bangladesh for the idea.