Water, soil, human settlements and land management and the resulting material flows determine large parts of today’s land use. These are precisely the topics Joachim has been dealing with for almost his entire life. Usually, the individual areas of land use are always strictly separated – each sector has its own professional training, its own authorities, its own structures and its own actors. This one-sided organizational principle usually leads to the fact that meaningful synergies up to a comprehensive recycling of the accruing material flows are simply not implemented. Instead, more and more natural resources are relentlessly tapped, consumed, degraded and ultimately disposed of as “waste” in the environment. Only an intelligent and synergetic linking of these individual areas of land use with their specific material and energy flows, using simple, nature-based processing and recycling methods, will lead to a true circular economy. Only with this fundamental insight will we humans be able to sustainably conserve natural resources and regenerate the damage already done to nature, the environment and the climate. The key technologies developed by Joachim represent a valuable part of the solution!

In the nineties, Joachim founded a planning and development office for sustainable water management, which from then on carried out project planning, design and implementation of nature-based processes and plants for wastewater treatment. In the following years, hundreds of plants for the treatment of municipal, commercial, industrial and even special wastewater were successfully implemented. In addition to practical implementation, the company always maintained a close relationship with science and research, on the basis of which numerous joint research projects were carried out. The own claim was high, because it was not only about waste water purification – it was about far possible recycling economy! Thus, the own processes were permanently developed further, so that there was always a certain technological lead on the market. At the end of 2005, Terra Preta came into play; Joachim’s attention was drawn to this mysterious soil by a friend and from then on he was electrified. It could not be that scientists from all over the world had not succeeded in researching the production method of this fertile soil for more than 20 years. For Joachim, one thing was clear; if he and his team succeeded in unraveling the problem, then this would be exactly the “missing link” to a complete circular economy that he had always been looking for. And the reconnaissance succeeded. From now on, the company concentrated on the development of technical processes and ready-to-use products from liquid and solid biogenic material flows according to the ancient principle of the former Indian advanced civilization. Quoting Joachim: “With every day that we dealt with Terra Preta, the potentials and fields of application grew. Inquiries came from universities and interested people from all over the world. Our small company was not geared to this at all.” In addition, at that time the approval of products with vegetable carbon from organic residues was extremely problematic due to the German Fertilizer Ordinance. The authorities were also completely unfamiliar with the subject of Terra Preta, so they often acted rather restrictively and delayed approval procedures. To this day, the generally used and legally approved methods for the treatment of organic residues are composting and fermentation. At the same time, composting should be viewed extremely critically in times of resource scarcity, soil degradation and climate crisis! There were practically no legal regulations for the application of plant charcoal or the fermentation process. Instead, the agricultural approval of products based on plant carbon was more or less blocked via the German Fertilizer Ordinance, which was in force until recently. It was not until the European Fertilizer Ordinance came into force in June 2022 that the course was set for a comprehensive circular economy – products with plant carbon based on organic residues may now finally be used in horticulture and agriculture, exactly as Joachim and his team had been demanding for years. The company had already succeeded in implementing a number of pioneering lighthouse projects, such as several municipal wastewater treatment plants, where the purified water is used for agricultural irrigation in the spirit of the circular economy. Also worthy of mention is the innovative fermentation residue treatment plant of the Groß-Gerau municipal utility company, or the design of a new residential and commercial area with comprehensive material flow management in Riegel am Kaiserstuhl. This has created a solid starting point for bringing these forward-looking key technologies to the world and thus contributing part of the solution to the current crises.