Meet 8 Young Founders Turning Trash Into Cash | World Wide Waste | Insider Business

young people around the world are finding ways to solve our trash problem in Kenya these bricks made from recycled plastic are Paving roads plastic waste is not just a cleaner problem it's not a Nairobi problem it's a worldwide problem in Sierra Leone this paste will become a sustainable cooking fuel made from coconut shells instead of wood the 18 year old who made it spent months developing the perfect recipe I was like it's either it works or it works it needs to work and in the United States this woman has saved 4 million beer bottles worth of glass from landfills and recycled them back into sand never let anyone tell you that individuals cannot make a difference because all of this is thanks to incredible individuals these entrepreneurs grew up in the era of climate change now they are inventing new ways to help the planet and make a profit off worldwide waste this is melted plastic mixed with sand it doesn't look like food ideally speaking that it's very visual like that 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 in Zombie mate opened her company jijenge makers in 2018. so jijenga is a Swahili word which translates to build yourself the factory processes three of the seven types of single-use plastics beyond my life these are the hard plastic and here my left these are the soft plastic Kenya has one of the world's toughest bands 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 starts our production without him we are happy so big up Vinnie 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 this is one of my proudest moments as a person as a team member and also so what you see here the machine and all the others we fabricated here in jijanga it is mixed together at very high temperature so it changes anything from 300 to 400 degree Centigrade where it mixes that plastic and sun and forms a gooey like a dough like material and that's what we make the breakfast each lump of the mixture is weighed by hand people say the smell is something like new asphalt on a hot day so debris currently Joseph is producing is the 1.3 kilogram so that's what it's measuring especially one particular gram of the mixer this hydraulic press can squeeze nine bricks at a time the ideally speaking and this is Lauren she's the guy with a with them at this point the bricks need to cool so they can Harden at room temperature so here's the creating 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 a pallet of 400 plastic pavers can sell for up to a hundred fifty dollars depending on thickness the company says that's about 25 percent cheaper than bricks made from concrete 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 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 natural chemical industry would like nothing better than to say and 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 zombie 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 she employs 20 people full time nearly all of them under 30 years old me my team and everyone else in this the space we get to Anna living and that I'm happy with most of our 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 zombies first experiments with plastic trash took place here now her bricks cover the entire driveway who said she has done this up to outside the compound and we are very grateful now we live in a very good place eventually zombie wants her business to grow internationally stick West is not just a Kenya problem it's not a 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 [Music] in India another company is also finding a way to reuse plastic waste these sneakers are made from 100 recycled materials the company that makes them says each pair contains 10 plastic bags and 12 bottles [Music] 23 year old ashay bhave launched daily in July 2021 daily because it is the Hindi word for plastic bags at first bave struggled to gather materials even though trash in India ends up in all kinds of places I assume that it would be easy to find innovas plastic bags but that wasn't the case so pave partnered with a waste removal company that hires rag Pickers those are people who collect recyclables from the street to sell for cash triotap Technologies offers them a steady paycheck and an indoor sorting space foreign they clean the bags in a hot tub filled only with water without any added chemicals and then hang them out to dry inside the warehouse sarudin Stacks eight to ten layers of bags at a time then places the pile under a heat press foreign this finished product will cover most of the sneaker the company's founder calls it daily text so it's a material that's made entirely out of waste plastic bags without the use of any chemicals they sell for about 25 us cents per sheet for Dean packs and ships them seven hours North to the netouche Footwear factory that's where the shoe will be assembled first daily text sheets are die cut using metal forms other patterns are cut from our pet fabric which is made from recycled bottles and woven into something like canvas these sheets come from a company in Taiwan the workers Stitch the two types of materials together he assembled upper gets stretched out Daly's souls are made from crumbs of Industrial Rubber a worker needs to rough the sole on this grinder so the glue added in The Next Step will adhere they coat the top of the sole with a clear glue a special UV light increases its stickiness the shoes go through a series of heat treatments and coats to strengthen the bond between the sole and the upper then comes the final round of stitching Daly's laces are also made from recycled plastic this Factory employs 170 people and makes shoes for three different companies we wanted to make sure that we're still using existing sneaker manufacturing techniques you know we didn't want to reinvent the wheel netouche turns out 15 000 pairs of shoes every week and they try to recycle everything even scraps that's recycled and some of it is also reused to make more Theory Tech sheets and once a customer is through with a daily sneaker bave says they can send it back to the company for a discount this allows us to responsibly recycle them we refurbished them and we're donating them to Charities and refugee camps thank you this young entrepreneur built a business by crushing bottles back into sand she co-founded what could be Louisiana's biggest glass recycling operation and in about two years she saved four million beer bottles worth of glass from landfills and it's ramping up at a time when Global supplies of sand are actually running out we are using up sand at a faster rate than it can be naturally created so volunteers use the crushed up glass to help rebuild the coastline Francisca Troutman started glass half full with her boyfriend in February of 2020 while they were still college students one night during college over a bottle of wine that we knew would end up in a landfill we decided instead of continuing to complain about the problem and the lack of glass recycling that we would just do something about it so we had this idea that was about it no waste management experience no recycling experience they raised about eighteen thousand dollars to cover startup costs including a machine that could grind up one bottle at a time as this literal mountain of glass started to form residential neighborhood we're like okay you gotta do something here quick since moving into this Warehouse in August 2020 they received a Non-Stop Avalanche of glass to recycle people can drop it off for free or pay to have it picked up once a can is full we will dump it into our Glass Mountain unless it's a special color it'll be mixed into here colorful bottles can be turned into Specialty Sand that sells at a higher price so this is blue sand made from Bombay gin bottles artists really love to use it people love to use it in their Gardens but most bottles are thrown onto what Fran calls Glass Mountain so Glass Mountain is always expanding and Contracting we're always adding glass to it and taking glass away to be crushed [Applause] eventually workers scoop the bottles up with this loader and dump them into a crushing machine foreign Ed out into the conveyor belt and it'll go up this conveyor belt and hit the Hammers where it'll be crushed and then turned into sort of a mixture of sand and gravel and labels the pulverizer leaves behind some larger chunks of glass that are too big to use everything that's bigger than 3 8 of an inch will be taken out so that'll include labels Metals caps anything non-glass will come out of this process they're still figuring out what to do with these leftovers the newer models allow you to send this waste stream back through the system so we're working on raising money in order to get that new system at the warehouse some usable sand is piling up too because one crucial piece of equipment is too small you can really see the difference in size of this compared to our machine so our machine can process a lot quicker than this can sift the sifter filters out any leftover label pieces and sorts the Sand by size and you just scoop the unsifted product put it in the top and it'll shake it all down until it's separated into each of the five sizes the largest screens of glass help pay the bills glass half full sells them as gravel some buyers mix it into flooring the smallest type of sand is a fine powder this is like the consistency of flour it's extremely soft I wish everyone could touch it and walk on it it goes into sandbags the company gives away for free people use sandbags to put up against their doors up against their homes where anywhere where water could get in because we're super prone to flooding here in between the powder and the gravel is coarse sand the kind friend and Max use to rebuild the coast so this is like the size we would be using for Coastal restoration you can see it's not sharp so it's not going to cut me at an event called a deployment the coalition to restore Coastal Louisiana dropped about 10 tons of recycled sand along Lake Pontchartrain this is the Battlefront that y'all are helping us to protect today thank you for coming Fran and max hand out the sand and burlap bags which were donated by local coffee roasters we like being able to move it with Manpower and kind of get as many people involved as we can it's a really beautiful thing to see Brandon Max hope their story will inspire others to make a difference I think this is really more so the story of a community coming together to say we we demand change and we're not going to wait any longer two individuals decided to start this and now over 2 million pounds of glass are not in a landfill and they're making a difference in other areas in South Africa two sisters figured out how to turn PVC into high-end Home Goods PVC is one of the most common Plastics in the world and even though this material can be recycled over and over again it often isn't that's what inspired these two sisters to launch their own business Moe is the artist behind Moe's crib they actually diet well her sister Michelle runs the business side of things or the other friends we are actually both Mo my African name is moshibudi which is an Mo and my sister's African name is morongwe and our surname also happens to be m o mugoni so it really made sense for us to call it most crib Moe and Michelle get most of their raw material from the wholesale company says Ubuntu piping most sorts through piles of broken PVC pipes sent to the scrap Heap before they were even sold like this there will definitely never be used for its sole purpose for water or sewage Etc so I can actually take this one and even though these are junk for construction companies they're the right amount of broken for Mo and Michelle it's like this defect right here is exactly what we're looking for we love this sort of thing so we're definitely be taking this these pipes are six meters long so workers cut them down to more manageable sizes pipes from PVC short for polyvinyl chloride are hard and durable but they can be heated and reshaped without losing strength and even a simple bonfire will be enough to do it the pipe comes in contact with the fire this is to make it so that it softens innocent mango nicknamed prawns worked as a plumber before this installing pipes similar to the ones who now mix into baskets he spins the pipe over the flame until it weakens into a workable texture this part of the process could expose workers to harmful fumes but the company told us they plan on switching to an enclosed oven sometime in 2023 with the aid of a box cutter he then ties one end of the now floppy pipe to an anchor then Franz walks backwards all in one smooth skillful motion slicing it into thin strips almost as long as the entire yard the strips are now ready for weaving but before we leave we have to then create a frame for the basket bronze has been weaving baskets for over a decade he's one of the company's 11 full-time employees basket plus minus one and a half hours full process it takes one meter of pipe to finish a planter the laundry basket requires two meters of pipe that makes each basket a one-off creation right nope chemists discovered PVC in the 19th century after exposing vinyl chloride gas to sunlight used in construction vinyl records clear IV bags even clothing but some of the things that make them so functional also make them hard to recycle PVC pipes used to contain harmful additives like lead and cadmium which can contaminate other Plastics headed for recycling so they need to be separated many large producers voluntarily removed a number of these harmful elements before 2015. but most countries don't outright ban them these pipes can be used for up to 100 years many of the ones ready for retirement still contain those dangerous chemicals so a lot ends up in landfills Mo and Michelle need pipes of a certain thickness for their weaving process too thin and they're not strong enough to withstand weaving too thick and they're too hard to cut properly so for years as they collected pipes Mo and Michelle also stumbled upon hundreds they couldn't use that made it harder for the Sisters to expand as the business continued growing and the demand was more we needed to find alternative sources so they partnered with the pipe manufacturer kusasa mining pressure systems in 2019. here discarded pipes of nearly any size can be recycled into exactly what the sisters need you can bring any type of pipe no matter the color and it actually goes through a regranulation process of which is two to three millimeters one thickness the granulator pulverizes the original pipes into a fine powder we can relate kusasa adds wax and lead-free stabilizers to the mix just like it does when it's making new or virgin PVC pipes workers heat the mixture and then push it through an extruder the PVC has to be the right temperature too cold then it's too hard to mold but not cold enough like banana you know of which is wrong they're not supposed to be like that the workers use water to regulate the temperature of the pipe the pipe hardens as water cools it and is then cut to the right size and voila the old PVC is now new PVC PVC is just a small part of our Global Plastics problem but the meconi sisters are happy to do their part and this we have found is a solution to this Global Environmental challenge that we are facing and we are doing that one basket one grass tray one chair at a time or one coconut at a time spent months of trial and error developing his recipe for cooking fuel made out of coconut shells instead of trees I was like it's either it works or it works it needs to work so I need to do everything for it to work he lost his adoptive family in a Mudslide when he was 17. before that he spent years living on the streets dreaming of the day he could launch his own business bio brick had helped prevent deforestation because they are produced from biomass risks they are not produced from wood he lives in a part of Sierra Leone that has lost 70 percent of its Forest cover over the last five decades one reason for deforestation is people chopping down trees to feed their stoves tree roots are essential to holding back the Earth during increasingly intense storms you move from having Lush Green Mountains to dark brown death traps the question now is can alhaji convince people in Freetown to swap wood-based charcoal for coconut briquettes [Music] coconuts are one of freetown's favorite on-the-go snacks vendors end the day stuck with heaps of shells that they need to get rid of somehow and that costs money this was supposed to be waste it needed to be transported to dump this thing now I'm going to pick it up for free alhaji says his company Rogue Style Trading collects about two metric tons of coconut waste per week he's aiming for 10 tons by the end of 2022. so this is the backbone of our products this is well for us workers clean the husks and shells and dry them for about a week next they fire them inside this steel drum it carbonized for like three four hours we put the fire out using water we have to wait for them to get dried they pulverize the charred coconuts into a fine powder and add water plus a secret ingredient to bind it all together the mixing is very challenging so the whole process depends on the mix a slight mistake on the formula you have to start all over again four days these ones are destined for shisha pipes in fact people who smoke hookah are his best customers these days alhaji's next big challenge is to grow his sales to reach people who will use his coconut briquettes for cooking fuel instead of cutting down trees it's not easy but it takes time it's very tough to build something great if it was not tough everybody would have done it so his mother says he's wanted to be an entrepreneur since he was a kid what they did they look Facebook but that all felt very far away when alhaji suddenly became the breadwinner for his family at age 12. I forget Mommy Friday 22-20 yeah he left his village hoping to make money to send home to his mother and sister I was just this kid who wanted to become somebody but I was not thinking straight I thought that it is just okay for me to move to Freedom so without thinking about where am I gonna stay who's gonna feed me who's gonna take care of me but I moved he lived on the streets for four years until he found a steady job and an adoptive family who took him in seven to eight months after my adoption I lost my my family that I was living with during the mudslide over 1100 people died and three thousand more lost their homes alhaji was left with just a few dollars to his name but he was desperate to do something to stop the deadly mudslides in the decade before the tragedy mudslides in Africa had already claimed thousands of lives one of the reasons that Cosmos light is the vast amount of deforestation because the roots helps to keep the soil Farm ohati began obsessively researching ways to stop deforestation he found YouTube videos of entrepreneurs from around the world making biomass briquettes to replace wood and charcoal he started saving money for an expensive mechanical extruder and perfecting his recipe our foreign but most people in Freetown still cook with wood you just can walk up to somebody and be like hey this is new this is different from what you've been using so it's a bit tough but we'll get there one day according to a study in the Philippines one ton of biomass for cats saves roughly 80 small trees and that can add up but preserving trees isn't enough parts of the solution Yvonne Aki Sawyer became mayor of Freetown by campaigning on a promise to plant one million trees by the end of 2022. she told us that alhaji's project makes her feel hopeful for the future the work that Elijah is doing is one of the ways in which you see the coming together of solutions for these multi-faceted problem of Sanitation and the environment in Calgary two brothers are doing their part by keeping busted skateboards out of landfills Adrian and Martinez pool have been skating the streets of Alberta Canada for more than 20 years they've now turned that hobby into a thriving business at the beginning we were only building from the material that we were able to scrounge up through like dumpster diving outside construction sites and then also the skateboards about 2 million skateboards end up in landfills every year after working in construction the pool Brothers have spent the past decade upcycling thousands of those boards into earrings coffee tables and their signature bowls skateboards are made out of maple wood that goes through a special treatment allowing it to be peeled Into Thin sheets each board or deck has about seven layers of those sheets glued together that makes deconstructing the boards a bit tricky they're extremely hard on equipment mainly because they are made out of hard maple and then a lot of glue but the quality of wood leads to durable products the skateboards are the nicest plywood that is made because it's solid Maple the whole way through Martinez picks broken boards up from local skate shops every week we'll also get calls from moms when they see our work and they'll be like I've got my son's boards in the garage and I'm going to throw them out like come get them the first step is to remove the grip tape ideally we'd like to do in the summer on a hot day and we just leave the boards out in the sun for a half an hour and that heats up the glue enough so that you can peel them off the next step is getting the boards back down to just bare wood we have to remove the clear coat that you can see on the top as well as the graphic and anything left on them so that the the glue can adhere properly foreign [Music] we've butchered them into all their congruent parts strips might become earrings tables credenzas or in this case a bowl to make a bowl Martinez stacks and glues tails and noses together each Bowl takes 20 of these nose and tail sections I sort of start looking at them based upon like the size and like how much curve they are and then so I'll sort of start with one that looks extra big make sure that the line up and they look congruent so that they'll laminate together well so this is basically the layout of the how the bowl is going to look and what the colors are going to be in it the boards are clamped together for 24 hours and left to cure for a couple more days after that and then the corners are cut off on the bandsaw and after that's done they're mounted on the lathe then he shapes and Hollows out the block of boards using skew chisels Bowl gouges and scrapers Martinez makes bowls in batches of about 15. each batch taking two to three weeks board manufacturers use different veneers and dies on each deck which makes every one of the pool Brothers products unique for decades skaters have faced all kinds of negative stereotypes in films and television they're often portrayed as Slackers and delinquents but the sport has earned respect over time and had its first Olympic appearance in 2021 luckily skateboarding got to go through this growth cycle so that skateboarding now is as big as any Olympic sport and has big mainstream sponsors has huge events now generations of skaters who grow up playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater are starting to give back skaters like Ryan Flynn whose online store chops is also turning old boards into new products we like functional works of our functional products many things from sunglasses to pool cues to screwdrivers we like we like them to be used we like them to have a real Second Life Ryan hopes his products will push others to think more about the environment even though we appreciate Recycling and it's like something we've grown into it's it's trickled down to other parts of our lives too right it's like we're more conscious likewise the pool Brothers believe their efforts will get skaters to consider what happens after they're done with their boards I think we definitely inspire people to get into woodworking or try to recycle skateboards or that sort of stuff hi this is Will story from the world wide waste team we want to bring you more stories that take a look at garbage and the creative ways people deal with it if you enjoyed this video please like And subscribe we also read all the comments if you have an idea for a video you'd like to see let us know you just watch excerpts from some stories we've done about young entrepreneurs click here for the full episodes

Channel: Business Insider

Views: 7,002,891

Keywords: Business Insider, Business News, waste, trash, cash, world wide waste, www, entrepreneurs, investors, generation, creative

Id: _XTYv-AP4Jk

Length: 33min 49sec (2029 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 28 2022