Thank You for Powering Ponda's Next Chapter
At Ponda, we have long admired the energy, creativity and determination behind RE-PEAT’s work. Their commitment to championing peatlands and the communities who depend on them - feels both urgent and deeply inspiring. RE-PEAT is a youth-led collective working across Europe, using creative advocacy to give peatlands the attention they deserve. Bringing together voices from art, science and activism, its members are united by a shared love for these vital ecosystems and a fierce commitment to protecting them.
Youth-led activism is essential in responding to the climate crisis, and it is always energising to connect with others who care about wetlands as deeply as we do. Over the coming months, we’ll be collaborating with RE-PEAT on a number of projects, but first, we wanted to introduce their brilliant team to the Ponda community. We’re delighted to sit down with them to explore how RE-PEAT began, the role of art in activism, and why peatlands deserve a much louder voice in the climate conversation.
To begin, could you share the story of how RE-PEAT first came to life? Where did the idea spark from, and how did it grow into what it is today? What are your best achievements in this time period?
Looking back now, it’s clear that September 2019 is a sort of BP and AP situation for a few of us: before peatlands and after peatlands. It was at this time that Bethany and Frankie were in Germany for a climate camp, which was set up to protest against a big chemical fertilizer company. They ended up spontaneously joining a peatland excursion and finding out about how vital peatlands are for the climate. On the bus ride home totally transfixed in this new mission, the name “re-peat” jokingly emerged. Since then, more and more people “re-peated” this moment of BP/AP, and so we formed a collective with many time-travelling multi-perspective starting points.
Over the course of the last five years together, we’ve learnt a lot more about peatlands. We have travelled across land and sea to visit them, listened to memories and built our own relationships with these landscapes. We’ve seen the importance of finding playful, metaphorical, collaborative, and imaginative ways of relating with peatlands and sharing their peculiar values. In return, the peatlands have guided us through explorations of grief, deep time, intergenerational thinking, migration, extraction, culture and more.
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Since starting RE-PEAT, what is one of your favourite or most surprising things you’ve learned about peatlands?
People often think about peatlands as wet places, but when they are dry they become places that attract fire. Zombie fires can smolder underground for weeks, months and in some cases years… waiting in the shadows for the right moment to emerge into the light and reignite the world above. The idea of zombie fires is totally ominous, but also strangely magical in the way that they escape our view and our control. This is why peatlands, when kept wet and healthy, are such important mitigators of fire and drought. With their absorbent properties, they can also help prevent flooding. Peatlands are vital, intelligent regulators of landscapes, they are ecosystems we urgently need to care for and protect.
Wetlands and peatlands are often overlooked in climate discussions. Why do you think they remain so underrepresented, despite their huge ecological importance?
Wetlands and peatlands are often overlooked in climate discussions because of how they have been framed culturally and politically. They are frequently portrayed as wastelands, as “scary” or “empty” places. As landscapes to be drained rather than valued, making their ecological richness easy to ignore. Their degradation is also a form of slow violence: like the frog in hot water metaphor, the impacts unfold gradually and go unnoticed until it’s too late. For example in the Netherlands, soil subsidence from drained peatlands happens slowly, yet over time the land sinks by meters. Restoring peatlands is also slow. It requires landscape-wide agreement and collaboration between many actors, which is far harder to organise than restoration efforts focused on a single plot of land, such as forests.
We delivered one of the largest peatland exhibitions to date, Limbo, created in collaboration with De Proef, a former horticultural school in the peat-rich province of Drenthe in the Netherlands. Inspired by the region’s long history of peat extraction, the exhibition brought together over 25 artists from around Europe, working across sound, data, video, and cartography to present peatlands as culturally complex landscapes rather than mere carbon stores. Alongside the exhibition, we hosted side-programming including lino-printing, artist talks, and a paludi dinner, pairing historical context with clear calls to action and significantly expanding the cultural and political visibility of peatland justice in the Netherlands.
The crowdfund supported the exhibition on a limited budget, ensuring fair artist compensation and enabling an interactive public programme, documentation, and a booklet that extends the work beyond the exhibition itself. Through over 200 pledges we reached just over €10,000! We are deeply grateful for the global network of supporters who made this possible.
Images from the Limbo exhibition taken by Caroline Vitzhum
Our crowdfunding campaign has officially come to an end, and what an incredible journey it has been. We are delighted to share that we have hit above our target with 256 new investors!
Every investment, every share and every conversation has helped strengthen our mission to restore wetlands through regenerative farming while building the next generation of natural performance materials.To everyone who invested, shared our campaign, introduced us to new networks or simply championed what we are building, thank you. Your belief in our vision has been instrumental in getting us to this point.
The timing of this campaign has reflected just how quickly Ponda is growing. Over the past few months, we've celebrated some remarkable milestones. We were honoured to be named Innovator of the Year at the Pride in our Planet awards, had the opportunity to meet Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, and Climate Minister Katie White, showcased BioPuff on the runway at Berlin Fashion Week, announced our latest collaboration with Imperial College London, and secured one of our biggest milestones yet: a £2.4 million project, supported by a £1.9 million grant through the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and Innovate UK's Farming Innovation Programme.
These milestones have also enabled us to grow our team. Over the past two months alone, we've welcomed three new team members across agronomy, materials science and business development, with three more colleagues joining in the coming months. Every fundraising milestone has helped us invest in the people needed to accelerate our mission, bringing together expertise across farming, science, engineering and commercialisation to scale wetland restoration.
Behind the scenes, our team has continued doing what matters most: expanding wetland farming. This summer has seen harvesting take place across the UK and Europe, strengthening our supply chain and demonstrating that regenerative agriculture can produce high-performance materials at commercial scale. Every harvest represents another step towards restoring degraded peatlands, supporting farmers and creating resilient, climate-positive supply chains.
The support we've received throughout this campaign comes at a critical moment. Healthy wetlands are among the planet's most powerful climate solutions. Peatlands store more carbon than all the world's forests combined, yet when they're drained they become a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. By keeping these landscapes wet, we can lock carbon back into the ground, restore biodiversity, reduce flood risk and grow renewable materials at the same time.
A note from the founders
“Our first fibre extraction machine was a kitchen blender. Back then, we were four students experimenting with plants and an idea we couldn’t stop thinking about. Today, we are closing this crowdfunding round with a whole new community of people choosing to believe in our mission. A lot has happened in between, and none of it has happened alone. Ponda has been shaped by farmers, conservation groups, the paludiculture community, researchers, universities, manufacturers, brands, public funding and grant support, programmes backing deep tech startups, and the friends and families who believed in us long before any of this felt obvious.
Together, we have been working to connect wetland regeneration with the products people use and wear. We are incredibly grateful to every person who has played a part. With this growing community, we are one step closer to proving that better products and healthier wetlands can be part of the same future.”
Co-Founders of Ponda- Julian, Nelly, Fin and Antonia
Over the coming months, we'll be launching new partnerships, bringing more BioPuff® products to market, expanding our network of wetland farms and continuing to demonstrate how regenerative materials can reshape the future of fashion, outdoor equipment and beyond. We're incredibly excited for what lies ahead and look forward to sharing every step of the journey with you.
From everyone at Ponda, thank you for believing in our mission and for helping us prove that restoring nature and building better materials can go hand in hand.
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