Scaling community-based collection with Mr Green Africa

Turning Plastic Waste into Value in Kenya’s Capital

Scattered across the city of Nairobi are a network of dedicated locations for plastic waste collection, including buy-back centres, small retail shops called dukas, and Total Energies petrol stations. Set up by the Alliance’s project partner Mr Green Africa, these locations enable plastic waste to be exchanged for cash or Green Points that can be used to purchase daily goods and supplies. Mr Green Africa aggregates the collected plastic waste and transforms it into recyclates that can be used as feedstock to produce new plastic products.

Mr Green Africa aims to scale community-based plastic waste collection in the country and supply brand owners and industrial buyers with traceable, high quality recycled plastic. Seeking to build a financially sustainable business model that retains social and environmental impact at its core, it was the first recycling company in Africa to be designated a Certified B Corporation in 2021.

With the Alliance’s support, Mr Green Africa aims to enhance its collection and processing capabilities across the region. The project will bring the community on board to increase plastic recycling rates, reinstate value into the waste stream, and contribute to the circular economy via an integrated approach that combines a technology-driven plastic collection model with incentivisation. This enables waste collection at source to integrate informal waste workers, micro-entrepreneurs, and consumers into a formal value chain, while promoting consumer participation, encouraging recycling, and improving material traceability.

Key areas of focus include scaling the development of a household collection system to supplement their existing network of informal waste pickers; developing food grade conversion capacity for PET; and building infrastructure to drive the holistic collection and development of recycling solutions for all plastic types, including hard-to-recycle plastic.To date, Mr Green Africa has one production line up and running, with a second in the commissioning phase. The Alliance is sponsoring a third line which will be commissioned by the end of 2024. In 2023, the project also began work on a Pre-Processing Hub, a facility built on a nearly five-hectare site where plastic waste will be manually sorted from an inlet flow of mixed plastics to improve plastic homogeneity and produce high-quality bales. Construction on the hub has since been completed in June 2024.

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