Founded
2019
Employees
16 (2024)
Location
Hamburg, Germany
Steward-owned since
2019
Steward-Ownership model
Golden share model
WILDPLASTIC® was founded in 2019 with the goal to free the planet from unmanaged plastic waste. Following their motto “recover, recycle, reuse”, they are collecting “wild plastic“ from the environment together with their partners and recycling it into circular products. In spirit of their dedication to a regenerative and circular system and to ensure that the company will always put creating systemic and ecological change first, WILDPLASTIC® was founded as a stewardowned company and successfully raised two rounds of aligned non-extractive financing.
WILDPLASTIC® was founded in 2019 by seven entrepreneurs with the goal to free the environment from plastic waste by structurally changing the way we think about plastic. In close cooperation with organizations and NGOs, the startup works globally to collect wild plastic from nature, landfills, and illegal dumpsites. Together, they ensure better working conditions for people working in the highly stigmatized sector. In spring 2019, WILDPLASTIC® started producing and selling the first trash bag made out of 100% recycled and formerly wild plastic.
The company’s mission is not to produce trash bags or plastic packaging. Instead, WILDPLASTIC® seeks to clean up the planet by regarding wild plastic not as waste but as a resource with which they create new products. Their motto is to build a system on circularity and minimize one-sided extraction – an approach mirrored in their ownership and financing model.
To guard the focus on long-term system change, WILDPLASTIC® was founded as a steward-owned company. Opting for the golden share model for steward-ownership, 1% of the voting shares are held by the Purpose Foundation to protect the principles of steward-ownership. Over two financing rounds, a diverse group of investors (from family office to impact investors and Purpose Ventures) provided WILDPLASTIC® with non-extractive, mission-aligned growth capital using 1) convertible loans, 2) subsidiary loans and 3) redeemable equity to help the business grow whilst ensuring that the purpose of the business always comes first.
Germany alone produces up to 21 million tons of plastic a year. More than 80% of the plastic produced is made of virgin plastic and only 20% of it is being recycled. But especially countries in the global South are suffering from insufficient waste infrastructure. Environmental plastic pollution is everywhere. About 5 billion tons of plastic waste are littering our ecosystems and can be found in the environment, lakes, and oceans.
On their travels and in everyday life, the founders noticed time and again how much plastic waste collects on beaches, in nature, in the wild. Plastic waste that destroys ecosystems and livelihoods. Instead of simply worrying about the problem, they came together as a group to build a business model based on tackling plastic waste in the long-term – by cleaning up wild plastic and ensuring that no new plastic is used for their new products.
Conventional production processes are often focused on the addition of virgin plastic to create new plastic products. WILDPLASTIC® has developed a new solution: a process that makes it possible to use exclusively recycled and wild plastic in new creations – such as trash bags and plastic packaging.
Bright colors and unusual prints make the trash bags a real eye-catcher and add to successful marketing. And their plastic bags not only clean up the environment – but, according to a published life cycle analysis – also save up to 60% of CO2 emissions in comparison to bags made of virgin plastic.
A second growing product branch for WILDPLASTIC® is shipping materials made out of wild plastic. With ever increasing online shopping relying heavily on plastic packaging, packaging made from wild plastic creates a huge potential to clean up the world, regenerate ecosystems and save resources. Imagine how much plastic would get collected if all deliveries would be shipped in bags made out of wild plastic! This is what is envisioned in a collaboration between WILDPLASTIC® and the second largest online retailer in Europe, OTTO. By changing OTTO’s shipping bags to OTTOBAGs made out of collected and recycled plastic, the collaboration could clean up an estimate of 340.000 kg of wild plastic from nature and save 516.800 kg CO2e1. Additionally, WILDPLASTIC® is constantly expanding its partnerships (e.g. with steward-owned company Goldeimer) to reduce the amount of virgin plastic going into the system.
The task of cleaning the planet from plastic waste is monumental and intergenerational. It requires all the help – and attention – it can get. Therefore, and right from the start, the mission was set for the long-term and is reflected in the legal form and ownership structure of the company. To find a structure that would be aligned with their mission and goals, the founding team underwent a process where they would challenge their individual and team motivation that made them found the company in the first place, their visions for WILDPLASTIC® in the near and far future, and its focus in the long-term. They knew: For WILDPLASTIC®, the purpose would always come first and profits would be used as a means for this purpose – and not the other way around.
The founders’ goal was for WILDPLASTIC® to grow sustainably and clean up the planet in the long run, not to maximize shareholder value. They didn’t want to compromise their mission in response to shareholder pressure and profit maximization. And they never planned on making an exit and selling the company.
When hearing about steward-ownership and PURPOSE®, the idea of enshrining purposeorientation and self-determination into the company’s legal DNA resonated deeply with the founders’ idea and motivation. They wanted a structure that was aligned with their mission and allowed for a trustbased and supportive relationship with investors. After learning more about the concept and getting into contact with PURPOSE®, the founders decided that founding a steward-owned company was the perfect fit to enshrine their impact-orientation from the start.
Founded directly as a steward-owned company with a golden share model, WILDPLASTIC® now ensures that the company’s mission is always in focus and that decisions are made by people connected to the mission and activities of the company.
Purpose Consulting supported WILDPLASTIC® in the process of setting up a steward-owned company using the golden share model. The company was founded as a GmbH2 with the principles of steward-ownership enshrined in its legal statute and ownership structure. By separating the voting rights from economic rights, the model ensures that decisions are made inside the company on the basis of the company’s purpose and not on individual financial motives. The people holding the voting rights are stewards of the company and cannot extract its profits or assets. The voting shares cannot be sold, but are passed on to people actively working in the company, so WILDPLASTIC® can never be a speculative good. The control always remains inside the company. This structure is enshrined in the company’s legal statutes. To make it legally binding in the long-term, WILDPLASTIC® has entrusted one percent of the voting rights, a golden share, to the Purpose Foundation, which is legally bound to veto changes that undermine the principles of stewardownership, but that does not have any further say in the company (see illustration below).
Illustration: Share Structure until 2024
The steward shares make up 99% of the voting rights and are distributed evenly between the founders currently active in the company. The steward shares can only be held by people who are actively working in the company. They do not include any economic rights.
The golden share, or veto share, makes up 1% of the voting rights. This voting right is limited to a right to veto changes to the statutes of the company that touch the principles of steward-ownership. It doesn’t make up any further voting or economic rights.
The golden share is held by the Purpose Foundation, which is through its own statutes mandated to always use its veto in the case of respective changes.
Profits after capital costs can be reinvested, remain in the company or donated.
To decide whether steward-ownership was the right fit for the founders and the company, the founding team went through an intensive ‘soulsearching process’, in which they challenged and discussed their individual motivation, the role they wanted to play now and in the future and their vision for the company and its purpose. For them, this led to many discussions and produced insights that would usually have come much later in the further development of the organization. For a team of five, this process was intense and at times not easy, but eventually allowed for more transparency and a mutual understanding of the individual’s motives and roles. Their example shows the relevance of honest and trust-based conversations in the process of becoming steward-owned. “It wasn’t all easy, but the conversations we had, the issues we dealt with are insanely important and make a huge difference to our work”, says Christian Sigmund.
WILDPLASTIC® decided that the steward shares – the voting rights – should only be held by people playing an active role in the company. For WILDPLASTIC®, an active role is defined as a minimum of 20 working hours per week for at least two years, thus catering to different types of involvement in the company. This will come into place after a certain “founding period” that currently allows all five founders to hold steward shares irrespective of their active involvement in the company. After this period is over, founders who do not play an active role within the company (e.g. employee or Managing Director) automatically lose the qualification to be the trustees of WILDPLASTIC®. Their voting rights can be taken back by the company. This gives them the security that the company’s mission-orientation is protected in the long-term and the company cannot be controlled from absentee-owners.
Similarly to many startup founders, the founders of WILDPLASTIC® took a risk in starting a company and worked many unpaid hours before and after setting up the company. As they won’t be able to be compensated for this risk by paying themselves out profits later, they devised a process for a founders’ compensation once the company is able to sustain it.
The founding team, (existing and potential) investors and Purpose Consulting, calculated a sum for unpaid salaries and initial risks: the founders’ compensation. A contract was set up between the individual founders and WILDPLASTIC® stating that this sum will be paid out under the conditions that:
To leave flexibility for future developments of the company, details of the type of payment instrument for the founders’ compensation have not yet been fixed. Options include salaries, boni or other tools. By linking the founders’ compensation to payments made to investors, WILDPLASTIC® increases security for existing and potential investors.
The core principle of WILDPLASTIC® is to further a circular economy. To them, a basic component and driver of a circular economy is non-extractive, regenerative financing – investments designed to support the purpose of the company without extracting more value than they give in.
So this is what they set out to build throughout their financing rounds. Through steward-ownership and aligned financing, they ensured that the company cannot be controlled by investors and cannot be sold as a speculative good. This was a purposeful statement with which they wanted to protect WILDPLASTIC®’s mission and show their motivation and purpose. Still, to grow and make a difference in the world, the company needed capital and aligned financing partners, who share the same vision and want to support the company – whilst making a fair return.
The first step to finding aligned financing was to clarify what kind of investment partner and financing conditions would support the company best. Based on their mission, strategy and ownership structure, they set up the future financing conditions:
