An UNTHINKABLE solution for Nigerian plastic waste

this is a story of how we went to the biggest city in africa and teamed up with a local entrepreneur to help create a local circular economy for plastic waste in lagos nigeria but it wasn't that easy lagos is massive it has over 20 million people in the metro area with 10 000 people moving into the city every day this leads to a lot of infrastructure problems [Music] stuck in traffic again rough roads poor planning and you guessed it plastic waste everywhere honestly it is shocking meet victor he is part of a new generation of young entrepreneurs trying to change the situation in lagos by starting up recycling businesses and he is hustling all the time we've not done anything 24 hours call your people everything at once no time it's best to just give me the best price it never stops but i mean i do too many things on the road the streets stop the recording our biggest challenge that we see is the level of incentive that is provided to individuals on you know recycling there is not enough awareness or motivation for people to actually consider recycling so you might be thinking why is it that there's plastic waste everywhere where you can actually collect and sell this stuff i mean these guys are buying well most of the plastic waste that gets collected in lagos is shipped overseas to be processed into new products only to be re-imported into nigeria moving all that plastic and products around the world is expensive and makes it hard for recycled plastic products to compete that's where we come in but they said we have to go to a nigerian wedding [Music] if we can shorten this supply chain by using small scale recycling machines to make products locally you can cut out the middlemen and make recycle plastic more valuable and then we have a circular economy because once it's manufactured into new products auto same products it gets back to the consumer it can be used again and then we ride and take make and dump now we take make reuse recover and recycle so it goes on like that and that will give people more incentives to start collecting it when people start to see that this can turn into this and they know that if i do this i get this with the plastic and recycling they'll do more of it and they'll start to tell people to do the same thing as well we want to do this by using plastic waste collected in lagos to create circular building materials for the construction and furniture industry this game with a whole bunch of challenges so we're right now we're kind of unpacking the machines checking everything went well with the shipping and everything looks pretty good uh it went off our way so that that's good that it ended up just fine okay so here is the space like at the moment you have a wall here okay so we're gonna break the wall so you're gonna break this one everything is going good uh you know it's always a few things to take care of in terms of getting setting up um but we're happy with how things are going so far and we're excited to kind of get the machines in tomorrow hopefully hopefully uh up and running soon [Music] we move it flat okay moving [Music] i think i need a shower yeah what we realized like there is no three-phase power coming to the house so we thought at the beginning that there was three-phase in this house but that's not the case thankfully as the electricity is not very stable here they also plan to have a generator which anywhere is going to bring three phase to the place it's not ideal that you have a generator running every time like like you can even like calculate if it's really productive in that case because you're burning oil to make plastic so yeah i don't know but that's more subjective i would say but anyway this place is kind of temporary for them as well that they don't plan to stay more than a year or something like that here and then that's going to make them starting and in this not ideal situation and then they're going to move in a in a proper industrial place anyway i'm worried that we're going to run out of time to be able to start powering the machines train uh the juba folks on how to use the machines before we're supposed to go back on friday or on saturday so it's uh cutting in a little bit close [Music] today i'm going to run through two sort of presentations first one to kind of give you some context about what precious plastic is and kind of our strategy and kind of how we differ from the traditional recycling industry and then second i'm going to do some uh presentation on plastics in general so if one whether the plastic nap pet or not need to connect the motor to the rest of the shredder and this is happening behind this cover this is open boom it stops but to be clear tomorrow we have a presentation and we don't have nothing to present i just went to college last day to do it getting it rented a generator this should be it it's our last chance after an intense two weeks with tons of ups and downs with only two hours left before the event to present our work victor and his team produced the first recycled plastic sheet in lagos nigeria [Music] it all came together as we presented the first sheets to a group of local business owners interested in using this material to close the loop for plastic and legos victor is now equipped with the machines and the knowledge to recycle lagos's plastic waste into new local products if you too want to start to recycle plastic go to preciousplastic.com and find out how to start a recycling business and create a circular economy in your community you

Channel: Precious Plastic

Views: 16,177

Keywords: precious plastic, plastic recycling, recycling, nigeria, lagos, entrepreneur, open source

Id: iSGz05O5Meg

Length: 7min 57sec (477 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2022