12-2022
Dear members, dear friends of the environment!
In the last few months, we at oeoo have once again been able to successfully move forward with numerous cleaning and education projects worldwide. With the articles and videos in this newsletter shortly before Christmas, we would like to give you again an insight into our diverse work. The aim of our daily work is to combat marine plastic pollution and to preserve our livelihoods for ourselves and future generations.
To do this, we also need your support. It's getting closer to Christmas and the requests for donations are piling up. We are no exception, of course. Because oeoo finances its work exclusively through donations and sponsorships. Therefore, we would be very happy about your donation.
Perhaps you will have some time and leisure to read through our newsletter in the days between the years, so that you can assess our work against plastic waste in waterways.
Now we wish you some relaxing and contemplative holidays and all the best for the year 2023! Avoid plastic wherever possible in the new year!
Günther Bonin & the team of One Earth - One Ocean e.V.
P.S.: You can donate 0.5% of the purchase value to oeoo with every online purchase at Amazon - at no additional cost to you. How? Please use AmazonSmile instead of the regular Amazon homepage and select One Earth - One Ocean once as the beneficiary social organisation. You can find information about AmazonSmile here. Thank you very much!
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One-week cleanup campaign of the Parañaque River in Manila
🇸🇽 Together with Siemens Gamesa, oeoo Manila launched its first pilot project with local fishermen from the Bulungan fishing port in mid-November, supported by the Maritime Police Group.
With up to 7 traditional fishing boats, a service boat from oeoo and many helping hands from the communities, the river arms in the districts of La Huerta and Don Galo as well as the mouth of the Parañaque River were cleaned.
The oeoo clean-up lasted a whole week, was a pilot project and is hopefully only the first of many follow-up actions. After all, the amount of rubbish is overwhelming. In the 7 days, a total of 33.6 tonnes of marine litter was collected. Unfortunately, the river is simply abused by many as a rubbish dump. While the helpers were collecting the rubbish, new rubbish came flying out of the windows from above into the river.
At the end of the week, there were many happy faces and everyone wants to do it again. Hopefully, this also applies to Siemens Gamesa, who made this action possible. Our thanks also go to the City of Paranaque, the PNP Maritime Police Group, the Barangays Don Galo and La Huerta and last but not least the Bulungan fishermen for their support.
Read the detailed report here.
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Cleanup of the Mafia Islands off Tanzania
🇹🇿 Around the Mafia Islands on the coast of Tanzania in the Indian Ocean are beautiful reefs and an impressive biodiversity with dolphins, tuna and sea turtles. These lay their eggs on the beach, but they are highly endangered by plastic and other rubbish. That is why oeoo is involved in litter collection campaigns to protect this sensitive biotope. As a first campaign, oeoo organised a joint action with SDA in 2021.
In September, a team from SDA and oeoo was there again. In a team effort of SDA, oeoo and local helpers, the beach sections were cleaned. Away from the tourist beaches, there are unfortunately many littered sections. The fight against plastic waste is largely left to private initiatives and NGOs.
But there are first hopeful approaches. For example, a scrap dealer on Mafia Island buys up collected plastics to process and sell them as recyclates.
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🇩🇪 When a Russian nuclear submarine suddenly appears in times like these in the immediate vicinity of the SeeKuh in the Baltic Sea, you do get a bit of a queasy feeling. This is what happened during a search trip by the oeoo/SDA crew for ghost nets north of the island of Fehmarn in July. With a length of about 170 metres and a crew of up to 160, the "Vepr" is one of the largest submarines in the Russian navy. However, they did not want to support us in the search for ghost nets.
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Successful children's and youth work at oeoo Rio
🇧🇷 In addition to regular cleaning campaigns with the fishermen of Guanabara Bay, during which more than 10 tonnes of plastic waste were collected in August and September alone, oeoo Rio has meanwhile established successful children's and youth work. In October, Thaiane Maciel (see below), the new director of oeoo Rio, presented oeoo's work at the II Municipal Environmental Conference for Children and Youth in Public Schools. In the environmental action with following cleanup, children and youth learned that plastic can be reused and how long it takes for it to degrade in nature. In November, further children and youth education projects on the topic of the environment took place in two municipal schools in Rio de Janeiro.
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In the video, Thaiane Maciel introduces herself and her work. She is the new director of oeoo Rio. In 2015, she had already founded her own environmental organisation Canal Novo Mundo. In last summer, the 29-year-old was named a "Green Citizen" by UNESCO for her commitment.
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🇩🇪 This year, oeoo was once again able to realise a wide-ranging educational programme at the Hamburg Education Week at the end of September. Sabine Frank presented the importance of marine conservation to 150 young and enthusiastic pupils in 6 readings from her children's book "Mats and Pia save a seal". Manfred Kähler presented the SeeKuh with its activities of collecting rubbish and ghost nets to 35 classes from grades 3-8 as well as some upper school classes. In the evaluations of the event, there was widespread praise from the 436 pupils and 45 teachers.
In its 5th year, the workshops "Plastic flood in the Elbe" again showed not only microplastics in the water samples but also plastic waste in the water of the Elbe on almost every outing. 130 upper school students who took part in the workshops were very shocked when they realised that plastic has already penetrated all areas of life. Special thanks to Berenike Steiger, co-founder of In Mocean e.V., who supported the workshops and presented the waste situation in Mexico and practical upcycling with her machines.
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More clean-ups...
We currently have so many interesting topics and projects that there is not enough space in the newsletter. Therefore, we would like to recommend a few links to our website where you can read more interesting articles about our worldwide work.
🇰🇭 For five years now, oeoo has been successfully protecting the environment in Cambodia. The first project started in 2017 in Battambang, the country's largest city in terms of time. Read here about the work of the team, which has already collected over 100 tonnes of rubbish from the city's waters this year.
🇩🇪 A deep insight into the work of our team in Kiel and our partners from SDA can be found in the current report on the ghost net campaigns with the SeeKuh this year on the Baltic Sea. In total, almost 900 kg of nets, fishing lures, lines and fish traps were retrieved from the depths by the teams during their salvage operations in 2022. Here is the interesting report (only in German) and a video.
🇮🇩 Together with our sponsoring partner, the Schwarz Group (Lidl, Kaufland), oeoo had started a river cleaning project on the Bekasi River in Bekasi in the metropolitan region of Jakarta/Indonesia in 2017. After three years of development work, the project has now been handed over to the Bekasi city government. Read here what role oeoo will play in the project in the future. |
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A lot of work to do at Lake Victoria
🇺🇬 Lake Victoria is both a source of water and food for 40 million people in East Africa. But unfortunately, vast amounts of rubbish on the shores of the lake and in canals are a common sight today. As part of the Nile Coalition, oeoo had started a long-term project with our local partner, the Uganda Junior Rangers, in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, in spring. Currently, a sea hamster made of fibreglass-reinforced plastic is being built in a local training yard for fishing boats. In addition, oeoo has financed a TukTuk to transport the collected rubbish. Together with SDA and the rescue diving team of Kampala International Airport, the first exploration dives were organised in autumn to document the pollution under water. Ghost nets were also removed from Lake Victoria. In mid-November, the first major cleanup took place, during which 15 tonnes of rubbish were collected. |
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Rainbowsport Zurich for oeoo
🏳️🌈🇨🇭🏳️🌈 The badminton team of the Zurich LGBTIQA+ sports club Rainbow Sport Zurich, with over 400 people who keep fit together in more than ten different sports, has been wearing our oeoo logo on the chest of their new team jerseys made of recycled PET material since autumn.
Inspired by our oeoo brand ambassador, Swiss national badminton player Joel König, the team is now promoting our organisation and collecting donations against plastic waste in the community. We are very happy about this and of course hope that other Rainbow sports will also want to promote our cause. The picture shows Denis Alavanja with his team in the new outfit at a Frankfurt tournament in early December.
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Well designed donation box against ghost nets
🇩🇪 The Spa-Hotel Birke and oceanBASIS GmbH (natural cosmetics) are supporting oeoo with a donation box that will be distributed via the DeHoGa association and used in hotels, restaurants, etc. to collect money for oeoo and against ghost nets. Up to 100 copies of the strikingly designed box are to be produced.
Kerstin Mayer from the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts in Kiel developed the design of the box with her students. It captivates with its wave-shaped lid, in which ghost net fibres made of plastic are incorporated. The bottom of the glass box is also lined with ghost nets. The donation box thus illustrates that the oceans are threatened by plastic waste. The student winning team with Wanyao Wang, Limin Zhang, Yiyin Mei, Xue Qiu was awarded for their innovative design at the end of November.
Photo: Inez Linke/oceanBASIS, Kerstin Mayer/Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts Kiel, Wanyao Wang, Limin Zhang, Rüdiger Stöhr/oeoo, Rainer Birke/Spa-Hotel Birke , Yiyin Mei, Xue Qiu.
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