It was end of April, but the beginning for the Alliance of Pioneers: 14 large commercial enterprises from the paper, packaging, construction, insulation and wood-based material industries declared at a kick-off event in Berlin that they would test renewable, regional raw materials from wet peatlands in their production and integrate them wherever possible. According to the joint press release issued by the Michael Otto Environmental Foundation and the Succow Foundation, partners in the Greifswald Mire Centre, which launched the PaludiAllianz in the toMOORow initiative, the aim is to achieve rapidly growing demand for paludiculture in various sectors of the economy. Well-known companies are now among the founding members:

Interest in future paludiculture products in the construction sector has been expressed by prefabricated house manufacturer Bau-Fritz GmbH & Co. KG, the construction group STRABAG SE and OTTO WULFF Bauunternehmung GmbH and Sto SE & Co. KGaA. The companies toom Baumarkt and OBI Group Holding SE & Co. KGaA also consider biomass from paludiculture in the horticulture segment as a supplier of substrates. The retail and service company Otto (GmbH & Co. KG), LEIPA Group GmbH, the WEPA Foundation and, in the area of recyclables management, PreZero Stiftung & Co. KG with OutNature GmbH aim to make paper and packaging more sustainable by adding of paludiculture biomass. Procter & Gamble Service GmbH is involved in the area of consumer goods for household and cosmetics, as is Tengelmann Twenty-One KG with KiK Textilien and Non-Food in the retail sector.
“Development of scalable value chains with paludiculture biomass from rewetted peatlands in Germany in practical cooperation with economic players” (PaludiAllianz) is the detailed title of the project, for which Cem Özdemir, Federal Minister of Agriculture and Nutrition, handed over a funding decision of almost 1.8 million euros over the next three years at Kulturbrauerei in Berlin. As rewetting also offers effective natural climate protection, Federal Environment Minister Steffi Lemke was also a guest speaker at the event.