takeover*: home heritage- a conservation forgefor the ruhr area

Holiday trips, exotic foods and things that end up in the corner immediately afterwards are part of our everyday consumer behaviour. This has a negative impact on our environment: important resources are consumed, habitats are degraded or destroyed and species extinction is on the rise. So how can the damage caused in this way be avoided and compensated for in order to achieve an ecological, environmentally sound way of life in the long term?

lala.ruhr cooperates with the Impact Factory, a start-up platform for social entrepreneurship, and has exchanged ideas here with the innovative Essen-based company HeimatERBE GmbH.

HeimatERBE GmbH was founded together with its sister company greenzero.me 2020 by Dr. Dirk Gratzel after he had made it his mission to record and compensate for all the environmental damage he had caused in his life. To this end, he was in contact with numerous scientists and was finally the first person to determine his complete life eco-balance and the resulting damage to the environment together with the TU Berlin and the TU Braunschweig – this corresponds to what greenzero.me does today. Together with other experts from the fields of forestry, ecology, biology and nature conservation, he then developed a strategy to compensate for the environmental damage – this is now the work of HeimatERBE GmbH. With the help of the two sister companies, business enterprises in the B2B model now have the opportunity to make their organisation, their service or their products environmentally neutral.

HeimatERBE now has seven employees in the fields of ecology, economy and technology. The urban and landscape ecologist Madlen Sprenger (M.Sc.) was a guest at lala.ruhr and told us about the idea behind HeimatERBE’s corporate principle. In the interview with our intern Stephanie Stiehm, the compensation of environmental damage and the HeimatERBE principle were discussed:

What exactly do you do at HeimatERBE? What is your mission?

The goal of HeimatERBE is to compensate for negative environmental impacts. To this end, we are currently restoring old industrial sites from the Ruhr region to as good an ecological condition as possible, in which they then provide (secondary) habitats for diverse plant and animal species. Natural as well as cultural landscape biotopes thus ensure the creation of new ecosystem services as well as the preservation and improvement of existing ones*. The creation of new biodiversity and the protection of the climate and people are the top priorities for HeimatERBE. HeimatERBE thus creates added value for nature and for society. They offer this added value to companies to compensate for their negative environmental impacts from services or products, for example.

*”Ecosystem services are the services provided by nature to humans through habitats and living organisms such as animals and plants. Ecosystem services provide the basis for basic human needs, such as access to water and food. Functioning ecosystems depend on an interplay of numerous organisms, such as primary producers (e.g. plants), herbivores, carnivores, destructors (decomposers), pollinators and pathogens. Biodiversity with all its levels is therefore considered the essential cornerstone of ecosystem services” [1].

 What is the HeimatERBE principle? What components does it consist of?

The HeimatERBE principle describes the process that leads to achieving environmental neutrality. At the beginning of each project, the life cycle assessment of a person, organisation, product or service must be calculated. This analysis determines all environmental impacts from production to disposal, including the manufacture of consumer goods. (This balancing is standardised in DIN EN ISO 14040/44.) The results are then monetarised – i.e. converted into environmental costs according to the standard of the Federal Environment Agency. The environmental costs are a purely monetary amount which we receive from our life cycle assessor (e.g. greenzero.me). It describes the actual environmental impacts. This then results in the environmental value, which creates a balance between the environmental costs. The environmental value represents the amount of money needed to compensate for the harmful environmental impacts. What we have to spend financially for the production of efficient and functional ecosystems – i.e. the production costs up to “biotope maturity”, corresponds to the environmental value.

How can HeimatERBE then work with it?

Life cycle assessment and monetisation are of course always aimed at causing some damage. Of course, it is important to reduce this damage as much as possible in the process first. HeimatERBE only offers compensation for such processes that have already been optimised. What we then do is reinvest these identified environmental costs. The environmental value we create is the reflection of the environmental costs. This is the momentum where environmental neutrality is achieved because the costs are reinvested at this point in the process and the externalities are internalised. The customer has to pay one-to-one for the compensation of the environmental costs. By monitoring the development status, HeimatERBE can check whether the goals of its compensation measures, which we describe in a development plan beforehand, are being achieved. For HeimatERBE, the focus is on environmental neutrality. In addition to the greenhouse effect caused by the emission of climate-altering gases, components such as acidification, overfertilisation (eutrophication), ozone pollution on the ground (summer smog) and destruction of the (protective) ozone layer in the stratosphere are also included. Compensation strengthens the protected goods of biodiversity, climate and human health. The terms explained above, such as life cycle assessment, monetarisation, environmental value and ecological enhancement performance, are elementary components for achieving environmental neutrality.

What are your current projects and what are your next plans?

A current example is the former Ewald 5 shaft site in Herten. There, an old forge stands on the site as a very special feature. The area was still relatively heavily used as a construction site until August 2021. Today, calm has returned and we decided to convert the building into a “species protection forge” – we had already found traces of (previous) colonisation by a barn owl and bats, so the rededication was perfect. This means that the whole building is for species protection only. We have closed the building completely to humans and have only created entry points for animals, especially for bats and for birds that live in the building. In addition, we have created nesting aids and roosting structures on the façade and inside the building, which can be used as habitats for the animals. But there are also small entrances for ground-dwelling small mammals and co, which can also find shelter there. However, this building only makes up a small part of the 8 ha area. In other parts of the site, HeimatERBE will also carry out unsealing and deconstruction measures, remove rubbish, preserve and optimise existing biotopes (e.g. convert afforested stands into native forest communities or convert damp open land into extensive cultural landscape use) and create new habitat types or encourage/allow their development (e.g. fields with pioneer and spontaneous vegetation, flower-rich herbaceous borders, wild fruit stands).

Another very interesting site is the Kurl 3 area in Lünen. There, for example, goldenrod is relatively widespread and actually determines the whole character of the area. At first we thought it would probably make the most sense to remove the soil. But in contact with NABU from Unna, it turned out that various orchids were already present there. Now we are in the process of gently converting this area so that we can preserve the orchid populations.

A very special project, which far exceeds our previous work in complexity and scope, is currently underway in Duisburg-Ruhrort. Together with the Haniel company, we at HeimatERBE and greenzero.me have set ourselves the task of transforming the district into the world’s first environmentally neutral neighbourhood by 2029. There will be a lot of work to do with the city, local businesses, interest groups and, of course, the citizens of Ruhrort. It will be a challenging project that has great potential for the district, the whole city of Duisburg and the Ruhr region.

Further purchases of degraded and devastated areas, which do not necessarily have to be former industrial sites and in the Ruhr area, are planned in order to be able to meet the growing demand for holistic, multi-dimensional and local compensation, according to our previous working methods.

All further information about the current projects and much more can be found on the HeimatERBE website. There is also a film explaining further details.

* lala.ruhr takes over the Instagram account of vier.ruhr, the alliance of Mülheim theatres, for three weeks with the takeover in January 2022. Our theme: the rubbish complex. We’ll take you on a digital journey through the region and beyond – to places where something is created from rubbish or where work is done with what we colloquially call it. We invite you to also think of the urban landscape of the Metropole Ruhr in a circular way and to discover all materials as part of cycles. We present the HeimatERBE company because, among other things, it takes care of the conversion of areas that were previously considered “useless” in the public perception and enables business enterprises to act in an environmentally neutral way.

Author: Stephanie Stiehm

Sources:
[1] Umweltdachverband (n.d.): Ökosystemleistungen – von der Natur kostenlos erbracht https://www.umweltdachverband.at/themen/naturschutz/biodiversitaet/oekosystemleistungen/