Meet our Team: Hanna
Meet the people behind the award who work closely with the start-ups, partners and media to turn every step of the process - from the first application to the final pitch – into a great learning and networking experience for all!
Who are the team members? What do they like? Find out in our interviews!
Hanna, what do you like about working for the Green Alley Award?
I like that I’m working in a business field that tallies with my own values: I believe that it’s our responsibility to take care of the environment we live in and consider the consequences of our actions on the planet.
The Green Alley Award supports those who invest their career and lives into promoting the Circular Economy. Being in touch with these people, the startups is very uplifting and inspiring. Building a business from scratch and believing in your idea is hard work and I respect and admire these achievements a lot.
I often feel that the Circular Economy attracts people that have a hands-on mentality and rather look at the things that can be done instead of looking at what went wrong. Keeping this spirit in mind also helps me tackling my own professional and private challenges.
Regarding the daily business of being part of the Green Alley Award team entails very diverse tasks and responsibilities. Throughout the year we have different phases of the award organization. Starting with the application phase to selecting the finalists and the big live event at the end.
That gives us a rhythm structuring the year, but since each phase is different, there is little routine which plays into my personality. I can work very creatively, come up with new communication concepts and try different approaches of promoting startups and the Circular Economy in general.
Which startup that ever applied for the Green Alley Award is your favourite and why?
Since my ultimate nightmare is a shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon, I tend to rely on online shopping for the things I find difficult to get secondhand (shoes!!!). At the beginning of the year I’ve made the pledge to restrict my orders to four for the entire year, but I still feel bad when I see the huge amounts of packaging that come with the items. That’s why my favourite startup is RePack.
The 2014 Green Alley Award winner has come up with a re-usable packaging solution for e-commerce. It works just like the bottle-deposit system and is thus super simple and yet ingenious. You order your stuff online and it gets delivered in a RePack envelope which you can simply send back so that it can be re-used again.
How do you live the circular economy?
I am a vegetarian and I don’t have a car. That’s probably already very sustainable, even though the reasons for it are more complex. What’s particularly important to me though is to minimize my consumption and try to use what’s already there. When I buy new clothes, I mostly opt for secondhand.
What I like about secondhand shopping is that by buying something that’s been discarded by others I can extend the lifecycle of these products. However, I also love the feeling of being on a treasure hunt. The same goes for furniture. I don’t know whether I am specifically lucky, but I always happen to come across the most amazing pieces, waiting for me on the street. Even though it’s sometimes difficult to get the stuff home (I once had to buy a bus ticket for my newly found cupboard), I have a story to tell about each and every one of them.