Young Inventor Makes Bricks From Plastic Trash | World Wide Waste

This is melted plastic mixed with sand. And it becomes as hard as concrete once a hydraulic press squeezes it into shape. A company in Nairobi wants to install these plastic bricks on streets across Kenya's capital. Could they become a solution for a country where 90% of roads have never been paved? And are roads made from plastic trash really a good idea? We went to Nairobi to meet the young inventor making bricks out of worldwide waste. Nzambe Mate opened her company, Jijenge Makers, in 2018. So, jijenge is a Swahili word which translates to build yourself. The factory processes three of the seven types of single-use plastics. Kenya has one of the world's toughest bans on plastic bags, but bottles and other containers are still everywhere. This is where workers sort them. They can handle about 10 metric tons of plastic every month. So, this is the guy who starts our production. Without him, we are happy, so big up. Vini operates the crusher, which pulverizes plastic into small pieces. Workers fold the dry mix together with a shovel. This machine heats the plastic and sand mixture until it's soft enough to mold. It is mixed together at very high temperature, so it changes anything from 300 to 400 degrees centigrade, where it mixes that plastic and sand and forms a gooey, like a dough-like material, and that's what we make the brick with. Each lump of the mixture is weighed by hand. People say the smell is something like new asphalt on a hot day. This hydraulic press can squeeze nine bricks at a time. At this point, the bricks need to cool so they can harden at room temperature. So, here's the curing bay. So, once we take from the hydraulic press, we feed it in the curing bay, and then after like about two to five minutes, you have a finished product. Many bricks come off the press with jagged edges. A worker breaks them off on a large stone before adding the finished bricks to a stack. For now, Jijenge's output is modest. We need to increase our production to mass produce what we are doing currently. Right now, we are doing like around 1,500 blocks a day. That's about enough bricks to cover a courtyard, like the one at this community center. For me, I think the price is cheaper and affordable compared to other materials used to make pavements. A pallet of 400 plastic pavers can sell for up to $150, depending on thickness. The company says that's about 25% cheaper than bricks made from concrete. We're also working on manhole covers. The other one is roofing tiles. The other one is drainage gutters. And also, in addition to that, we're targeting also to improve and optimize the technology because I get the feeling we are only doing like a really small portion of it, and there's so much potential that this technology has that we are yet to realize, and this is just the beginning. Turning waste into pavement is an idea that's already caught on in other countries. Construction workers in India have been mixing small amounts of plastic waste into asphalt for decades, making new roads that are stronger and that last longer. But experts say these innovations may increase the amount of plastic released into the environment. Roads are subject to constant abrasion. We drive on them, right? And so roads are actually the primary source of microplastics in the environment. Even on pure asphalt roads, the paints used to make lines contain plastic, and particles rub off the tires on vehicles every time they dry. Now, if we build the entire road out of plastic or even part of the road out of plastic, that is going to be more abrasion of plastic and more microplastics going into the environment. In recent years, researchers have found microplastics in nearly every sample of our food, drinking water, the air we breathe, and even inside our bodies. Tangri says that any solution that doesn't focus on decreasing the amount of new plastic going into production lets the people who created the problem off the hook. The petrochemical industry would like nothing better than to say, hey, we can put it all into roads or we can do something else with it. Still, roads made with plastic are cheaper, mainly because they require less asphalt. And they make good use of plastic that would otherwise end up in places like Dandora, Nairobi's only official landfill. The cars that bring this plastic are more every day, every day, they come every day. It reached full capacity 20 years ago, but new garbage keeps coming in. As you can see, most of the waste here is plastic waste. Amos Wamanya is an environmental activist and renewable energy consultant. We even have the smogs and all that plastic being burned. In Nairobi's poorest areas, there are no sanitation services. Many people toss garbage into rivers or just burn it, as much as 750 tons every day. Kenya does not have enough infrastructure to allow recycling. But that didn't stop American oil lobbyists from proposing a trade deal to export millions of tons of plastic waste to Kenya. The American Chemistry Council was advising the U.S. representatives within the trade deal negotiations to include a clause that would allow plastic materials to be imported to Africa through Kenya. Nzambi knows that her invention can't tackle a mountain of trash that large. So far, her factory has recycled 50 metric tons of waste this year. But Nairobi produces six times that amount of plastic trash every single day. We need variant solutions. So I cannot say this is the solution in terms of like, does the biggest impact and all that stuff, no. Does it have an impact? Yes. Do we need to do more? Definitely. Still, she is continuing to expand her business. Nzambi being the founder of Djenge motivates me a lot. She wants to achieve a lot in life. She wants to achieve a lot for the company. In 2020, the United Nations recognized Nzambi as a Young Champion of the Earth and awarded her $10,000. And she says her company is closing a half-million-dollar seed funding round. We have more demand that we can supply. And that's because there's a lot of market awareness and market uptick that is coming in. And once again, as I said, with the mental shift with consumption, but we cannot produce that. She employs 20 people full-time, nearly all of them under 30 years old. Me, my team, and everyone else in this space, we get to earn a living. And that I'm happy with. Most of her customers are local, including her mother, who is also an entrepreneur. She just started a business raising egg-laying hens in her backyard. They are very peaceful birds. Yeah, I've got 1,200. Yes. Nzambi's first experiments with plastic trash took place here. Now, her bricks cover the entire driveway. Even outside, she has done this up to outside the compound. And we are very grateful. Now we live in a very good place. Eventually, Nzambi wants her business to grow internationally. Plastic waste is not just a Kenya problem. It's not an Nairobi problem. It's a worldwide problem. And so if we can figure out how to solve it in our local, then it's easy to replicate that solution to maybe to start the East Africa region, Africa region, and then to the greater part of the world. And her biggest fans support the future she's building, one brick at a time. As a mother, I'm very proud about her.