by Kristin Frauenhoffer
Frederik Hornung is a passionate soccer player. Therefore, it was also obvious for him to look for a football club as a sending organization for his voluntary service with the Weltwärts program. He went to Zambia and came back with the innovative idea of making sustainable bamboo shin guards. Today his company ZamBam Sports is about to enter the market.
In football, the shin and Achilles tendon are particularly prone to injury. In order to protect these two body regions, there has been an obligation to wear pads in professional football since 1990. They are made of plastic and fiberglass and are usually not particularly sustainable. Frederik Hornung, just 23 years old, has set out to change that. About the Enactus e. V., which supports students worldwide in implementing their ideas for a better world in social and sustainable projects, he founded ZamBam Sports in 2020.
“At first I thought my idea of making the protectors out of bamboo was absurd. But as a team we decided to just give it a try.”
In his free time, Frederik Hornung is committed to a more sustainable world of sport.
The idea for this came to him during his stay in Zambia, where he volunteered to teach children football and even started a youth football league. The team he coached had four pairs of shin guards that needed to be swapped out. And the bamboo, which he had actually planted as a privacy screen for his accommodation, seemed to him to be the ideal raw material for the still vague idea of equipping his team and maybe even many more people with sustainable shin guards.
“At first I thought my idea of making the protectors out of bamboo was absurd. But as a team, we decided to just give it a try,” he says in an interview. Bamboo is fast-growing, robust and not very complex to produce. The goal is to produce CO2-neutral and with 100 percent regional bamboo in Zambia. ZamBam Sports not only has the market in Zambia in mind, but above all the German one. “We would like to send our products by ship and are currently examining how this can be implemented,” says Frederik. At ZamBam Sports, sustainable management is in the foreground.
ZamBam Sports pursues several UN Sustainable Development Goals
But ZamBam Sports does not only want to produce fairly in terms of environmental protection. Equally important are fair working conditions on site and cooperation on an equal footing with the partners in Zambia. “Our goal is to set up professional structures in Zambia. This includes, for example, permanent employment contracts and health insurance for our employees,” says Frederik, explaining one of his company’s goals. ZamBam Sports wants to meet a total of five of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals. In addition to those already mentioned, this includes health and well-being through the promotion of youth sports in Zambia and active climate protection through the use of bamboo.
ZamBam Sports is still looking for comrades-in-arms!
ZamBam Sports is currently still all about volunteer work. The approximately 10 team members drive corporate development in their free time alongside their studies or internships. Collaboration in different areas is therefore very desirable, be it energetically, financially or ideally. The next steps are the TÜV certification of the saver and the creation of the online shop. You can already pre-order on the start-up’s Instagram and LinkedIn pages.
We wish ZamBam Sports every success for the future!
Do you want to learn more about ZamBamSports?
Then go here to yours websiteon their Instagramkanal or on her LinkedIn-Profile.
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2023-07-16 00:31:33
#ZamBam #SportsSustainable #Bamboo #Shin #Pads #good #news
