Cologne: Company supplies environmentally friendly office products
Sülz / city center –
The dishwasher tabs with the lime, mint and ginger aroma are unpacked. The Everdrop brand cleaner is also available in tablet form, with a glass bottle. SHE can be used over and over again to mix the tab and the required amount of water. So there is no plastic waste. There is no longer any need to carry bottles around. The pencils can be planted after use. They are filled with seed pods and grow cherry tomatoes, basil plants, forget-me-nots, sunflowers or sage from the stumps. The printer paper is recycled, the pens are made from recycled plastic.
All of this is stored on shelves at Zülpicher Straße 58e to be stored in a “Less waste box” to be delivered to customers by cargo bike. Annegret Kronshage and Salomon Bohlen have just founded a company under these names.
All of the products they sell have one thing in common: THEY are environmentally friendly because they are either sold unpackaged or are made from materials that have a history or can be reused. THEY have one more thing in common: All items are used in offices. Kronshage and Bohlen believe that companies, co-working offices and other workplaces have their green baskets, the contents of which customers can put together themselves online, with every order or once, in order to then receive it regularly as a subscription order.
Cologne locals discover a gap in the market
The idea of founding a start-up that specializes in the sale of office supplies that are as environmentally friendly as possible came to them during the previous lockdown. “We are both event managers,” says Bohlen. “We met at the vocational school.” While the 29-year-old was already working in an event agency, his 24-year-old co-founder was finishing her training. But since school together, the idea was in the room, which arose from a contradiction in everyday life: “While we avoid more and more plastic in our private lives and try to be more environmentally friendly, in offices we continue to order packaged items and transport them all over Germany, from companies like Amazon, which are not exactly sustainable, ”says Bohlen.
Because the outlook for the event industry in the pandemic time is not exactly rosy, the realization that there is a gap in the market for sustainability in everyday office life was followed by the fact. The two sought-after and many products that make working life more environmentally friendly, you also forego long delivery routes and drive the baskets yourself with the cargo bike to the customers instead of with the car, in almost every district in Cologne on the left bank of the Rhine and in the closer part of the “Peeling sick”.
Also rescued food in the range
They have a wide range of goods on offer, starting with recycled toilet paper with neat anchors or patterns on it to coffee break treats such as the office chocolate from the “Rettergut” brand. These are “rescued” goods. When the machine switches from one type to the other in the production of chocolate, the first thing that is created is a mix of types that is normally thrown away. The rescuers are offering these for sale as mixed chocolate in environmentally friendly packaging.
When asked for the price, the offer is also convincing, according to the company founders: “Because we buy directly from the manufacturers and do not earn a wholesaler, we are sometimes even cheaper, often at least as expensive as conventional products,” says Kronshage. The young entrepreneurs hope that in the future they will be able to believe that many offices will have a less waste box.