Das Foundation
Local before scale
A programme that works in one neighbourhood because local people run it is worth more than one copied into ten places by outsiders. We would rather grow slowly and hand over properly.
About us
We work on the unglamorous half of the problem.
Awareness is not the bottleneck. Infrastructure is.
Our purpose
Making the sustainable choice the easy one.
Das Foundation exists to close the gap between what people are willing to do about waste and what their surroundings actually let them do. Nearly everyone will separate their recycling if there is somewhere to put it and a reason to believe it goes somewhere real. Very few will do it if the material sits in a corner for three weeks and then goes out with everything else.
So our work is deliberately practical: collection points that keep their schedule, signage that answers the question in front of the bin, and training that ends with someone able to run the thing without us. It is less photogenic than a beach clean-up and it lasts considerably longer.
How we work
Four principles we hold to.
Count what we claim
We report what we have weighed and recorded, and we say plainly when a figure is an estimate. Environmental work has an inflation problem, and we would rather be dull than part of it.
Work with, not around
Informal waste collectors already recover enormous volumes of material. Any programme that competes with them instead of paying and partnering with them is making the situation worse.
Design for the ordinary day
Systems get judged on the wet Tuesday when nobody is enthusiastic. If it only works during a campaign week, it does not work.
Governance
Who runs Das Foundation.
Das Foundation was founded in 2005 and is a registered non-profit governed by its board. Details of our registration, governing body and reporting are available on request, and we are glad to provide them to any partner, school or funder that asks.
If you need our formal documentation for a partnership or due diligence process, contact us directly and we will send it across.
This site replaces the one we first published in 2005. The work it describes has been running, in one form or another, ever since.
Want to see the programmes in detail?
Each one is documented — what it involves, who it is for, and what it needs to run.