Startup to Develop Special Glue for Climate Protests
Frankfurt/Main, December 11th, 2022. The startup Ecoglue, only founded in mid-2022, has secured a second round of funding due to an unexpected rise in the demand for its main product, a skin-friendly but very strong glue. The recent wave of protests, where climate activists have glued themselves (usually their hands) to the pavement or to artworks, in order to bring about a change in fossil fuel use and other climate-related policies, has increased the demand for a glue which can strongly stick an activist’s hand to a road (or a museum floor), without causing permanent skin irritation.
The glue is manufactured from plant-based ingredients only, without any petrochemicals in its formula. The orange color of the glue mass comes from the peach-base in which the active component of the glue is dissolved. Dry-times range in the minutes, depending on the ambient humidity and the surface the activist wishes to glue himself/herself/themselves to. “We are working on a new, improved glue, which will be perfect for this new form of protest” said Dr. Karl Krauss, head of R&D of Ecoglue in an interview via video-call “the new glue will stick within seconds even to artworks aged centuries”.
Glue Comes With Advice
Since Ecoglue considers itself a social enterprise, it not only provides skin-friendly pro-protest glue, but has also compiled a brief history of civil disobedience, and its successes and failures in political activism. The historical booklet can easily be read when glued to a piece of classic European art or a commuter road in England. It ranges in topics from Gandhi’s efforts for Indian independence to the European environmental movements of the 70s and 80s. The essay outlines how activism has either succeeded by directly interfering with a development judged as harmful (such as the hydroelectric damn in one of the last fluvial forests in Austria), or by directly (but non-violently) attacking authorities and their revenues (such as in the case of Gandhi’s Salt March).
In no case has irritating and annoying the common man and woman, in a way which is mostly unrelated to the cause the activists claim to champion, brought success to a protest movement.
The climate crisis is of course an extremely serious situation (some of this author’s writing on it, in German, is here), and any political efforts to work towards its resolution or at least to a reduction of its severity better be well thought out and goal-directed.
