Illustrations
Cacao value chain
Why does the cocoa value chain look like an hour glass? If you take a closer look, you see that millions of farmers sell their cocoa harvest to only a few cocoa companies in the world. Those companies are the biggest players in the value chain and claim most of the revenue of a chocolate bar. They process the cocoa beans into ingredients to make chocolate, such as cocoa powder and cocoa butter. Those ingredients are sold to other multinationals that make the actual chocolate bars and those bars are bought by billions of costumers, like you and me.
As you can see, farmers get only a small percentage of the revenue which leads to high poverty levels in cocoa producing communities. To cope with this poverty, children are often put to work on the farms. During my internship at Wageningen Economic Research I researched child labour in the cocoa value chain, which is a very complicated issue. Soon, the White Paper I worked on during my internship will be published.
MUD jeans
The clothing industry is still a mess considering sustainability and human rights. Luckily, there are a few clothing brands that are aiming for change, such as MUD jeans. During the Sustainable Development Goal Traineeship I joined a guest lecture from MUD jeans and got inspired to visualise their business.
MUD Jeans collects old jeans and recyles them into new ones. They teamed up with a textile processing company in France and a jeans production factory in Tunesia. Currently, they add paint and water to the production process, but their goal is to produce the first 100% recycled jeans in the world.
Pencil sketches
