We're officially funded! THANK YOU & updates from section one
We have reached our funding goal – what?! Is this real? We are incredibly thankful for your 199 (!) people who have made this happen. Now it’s official: with your help we can actually move Plastic Mountains: We are now able to cover travel expenses on our adventure, material costs for the costumes, press & events costs and technical equipment. Seriously, you rock. Thank you.
The Kickoff: Plastic Mountains has been successfully launched!
Not only have we reached our funding goal: The first week of our project has already been a major success! On Saturday, July 10th we had our kick-off event at Kulturstrand in Munich, where we presented Plastic Mountains and the beautiful costumes designed by Johanna, Giuseppe, Bella and Susanne, and talked to dozens of people passing by.
The next morning, we started our journey with 21 passionate people (thank you to everyone who tagged along!), who joined us on our first day of walking to Wolfratshausen. From there, we (Viktoria, Clara and Florence) hiked to Innsbruck within the next seven days.
Section one: 6 days of rain, 2 days of sun, 8 days of fun!
Even through the many hours of rain, we (mostly) managed to keep up the good spirit and our goals in mind. We feel super proud to have walked the distance to Innsbruck of 175 km and 4250 hm uphill (as well as around as many downhill), carrying the plastic crisis on our shoulders – and beautiful plastic costumes on our backs.
Thanks to some more media attention, we even became local celebrities in Bad Tölz – one of our highlights of this first week was being stopped by a group of teenagers: “Are you the plastic hikers? We’ve been discussing about you people at school. Cool project, good luck!” The idea of such young people talking about us in class was incredibly moving for us personally. And it was amazing to see that more people recognized us from the newspapers, or asked us about our funny costumes along the way. The feedback from people we've met has been super positive, and motivating not only for us hikers, but also for everyone working remotely behind the scenes.
After many discussions with all these interested people, and our second offline event (a movie screening on the plastic crisis in Innsbruck) we are happy to say: already at this early stage of the tour, we have already accomplished what we wanted – to draw attention to and initiate a dialogue about the many dimensions of the global plastic crisis.
Here are the links to some of the articles about us:
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muell-umwelt-alpen-1.5355564 (german)
https://www.tt.com/artikel/30796530/kunst-stoff-gegen-plastik-berge-umweltaktivisten-ziehen-durch-tirol (german)
https://newsrnd.com/news/2021-07-08-crossing-the-alps-should-indicate-a-serious-crisis--with-fashion-made-from-garbage-over-all-mountains.rkvxdNNad.html (english)
What’s next? Section 2 - plastic & health
While Florence and Viktoria are back home recovering their aching bodies, power woman Clara has just continued her adventure together with Marlene, Beate, Clara, Armands and François the team of Section 2. They will be walking to Pfunders at the border of Italy within the next week. Let’s wish them lots of power, interesting talks and good weather!
Want to enter the dialogue from home: join our online panel today (Thursday, July 22nd) at 6.30pm CEST via Youtube or Facebook stream and make sure to register at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/plastic-mountains-plastic-health-panel-tickets-160402284551?aff=ebdssbonlinesearch&keep_tld=1
There will be more online events in the following weeks, also covering topics like plastic and social inequality, plastic and environmental problems, and plastic solutions.
Do you want to stay up to date?
If you want to stay tuned on the campaign, why don't you join our newsletter? Simply write an empty mail with subject "join newsletter" to https://impactrevolution.eu/join/ we'll send you updates every now and then, typically no more than once a month.
And if you're not following yet, check out our instagram page, where you can find daily updates from our hikers, as well as interesting facts on the multiple dimensions of the plastic crisis:
https://www.instagram.com/impact.revolution/?hl=de
Thank you again for being part of our journey against plastic wast - you rock :)
Best wishes,
Florence, Viktoria and the Impact Revolution team
