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

Young people around the

world

are finding ways to solve our garbage problem in Kenya. These bricks made from recycled plastic are paving roads. Plastic

waste

is not just a cleaner problem, it is not a Nairobi problem, it is a global problem. In Sierra Leone, this pasta will become a sustainable product. cooking fuel made from coconut shells instead of wood, the 18-year-old who made it spent months developing the perfect recipe. I thought: either it works or it works, it has to work and in the United States this woman has saved 4 million bottles of beer. of glass from landfills and recycle them back into sand, never let anyone tell you that individuals can't make a difference because this is all thanks to amazing people, these entrepreneurs grew up in the era of climate change and are now inventing new ways of help the planet. and make profits from the

world

's

waste

this is melted plastic mixed with sand it doesn't look like food ideally speaking it's very visual like this and it becomes as hard as concrete once a hydraulic press squeezes it into shape a company in Nairobi wants to install these bricks of plastic on the streets of Kenya's capital in Zombie mate opened his company jijenge makers in 2018.

So, jijenga is a Swahili word that translates to build yourself. The factory processes three of the seven types of single-use plastics plus beyond my life, these are the hard plastic and here to my left, this is the soft plastic. Kenya has one of the toughest bands in the world for plastic bags, but there are still bottles and other containers everywhere. This is where the workers sort them. They can handle about 10 metric tons of plastic each month so this is the guy that starts our production without it we are happy so big Vinnie operates the shredder that pulverizes the plastic into small pieces the workers fold the dry mixture with a shovel this machine heats the plastic and sand mixture until it is soft enough to mold this is One of my proudest moments as a person as a member of the team and also what you see here, the machine and all the others that we make here in Jijanga , they mix at very high temperatures, so it changes between 300 and 400 degrees Celsius, where it mixes that plastic and the sun and forms a sticky dough-like material and that's what we make for breakfast.

Each piece of the mixture is weighed by hand. People say the smell is something like new asphalt on a hot day, so the debris Joseph is currently producing is 1.3 kilogram, so that's what it measures, especially a particular gram from the mixer, this hydraulic press can squeeze nine bricks at a time, ideally speaking and this is Lauren, she is the person accompanying them, at this point the bricks need to cool down so they can harden at room temperature, so here is the creation: in five minutes you will have a finished product. Many bricks come out of the press with jagged edges.

A worker breaks them into a large stone before adding the finished bricks to a pile. A pallet of 400 plastic pavers can be sold. up to one hundred and fifty dollars, depending on thickness, the company says it's about 25 percent cheaper than bricks made of concrete, but experts say these innovations can increase the amount of plastic released into the environment, roads are subject to constant abrasion, we drive on them correctly, etc. Roads are actually the main source of microplastics in the environment. In recent years, researchers have found microplastics in almost every sample of our food, drinking water, the air we breathe, and even inside our bodies.

Tangri says any solution that doesn't focus on decreasing the amount of new plastic entering production lets the people who created the problem off the hook. The natural chemical industry would like nothing more than to say, "We can put it all on roads or we can do something else with it," but roads made from plastic are cheaper. Mainly because they require less asphalt and make good use of plastic that would otherwise end up in places like Darra Nairobi's only official landfill. The zombie knows that his invention cannot cope with such a large mountain of garbage, so far his factory has recycled 50 metric tons. of waste this year, but Nairobi produces six times that amount of plastic rubbish every day, we need variant solutions, so I can't say this is the solution in terms of how it has the biggest impact and all of that doesn't, it has an impact, Yeah.

I definitely need to do more, she employs 20 people full time, almost all of them under 30. Myself, my team and everyone else in this space, we have Anna living and I am happy with the majority of our clients, they are local, including her mother. who is also an entrepreneur she just started a

business

raising laying hens in her backyard they are very peaceful Birds yes I have 1200 yes zombies the first experiments with plastic garbage took place here now their bricks cover the entire driveway who said yes We have We've done this even out of the complex and we are very grateful now that we live in a very good place.

Eventually Zombie wants her

business

to grow internationally. The West is not just a Kenyan problem, it is not a Nairobi problem, it is a global problem, so yes we can. Find out how to solve it in our local, then it's easy to replicate that solution to maybe start in the East Africa region and then most of the world in India. Another company is also finding a way to reuse the plastic waste from these sneakers. They are made from 100 recycled materials, the company that makes them says that each pair contains 10 plastic bags and 12 bottles. Ashay b, 23, launched it daily in July 2021 daily because it is the Hindi word for plastic bags at first had difficulty collecting materials despite Garbage in India ending up in all kinds of places.

I suppose it would be easy to find innovative plastic bags, but that wasn't the case, so pave partnered with a waste disposal company that hires rag pickers, which are people who collect recyclables from the street. To sell them for

cash

, triotap Technologies offers them a fixed salary and an interior classification space. They clean the bags in a hot tub filled with just water without any added chemicals and then hang them to dry inside the warehouse. sarudin Stack eight to ten layers of bags at a time and then place the stack under a heat press. This finished product will cover most of the shoe.

The founder of the company calls it everyday text, so it is a material made entirely from waste plastic bags without the use of any chemicals they are sold for. About 25 cents a sheet for Dean to package them and ship them seven hours north to the netauche shoe factory, which is where the shoe will be first assembled daily. Text sheets are die cut using metal shapes. Other patterns are cut from our pet fabric, which is made from recycled material. bottles and are woven into something like canvas these sheets come from a company in Taiwan workers join the two types of materials he assembled the upper is stretched Daly's souls are made from crumbs of industrial rubber a worker needs to rough out the sole of this grinder so that the glue added in The Next Step will adhere.

They cover the top of the sole with a transparent glue. A special ultraviolet light increases its adhesion. The shoes go through a series of heat treatments and layers to strengthen the bond between the sole and the upper. the final round of sewing 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 we still used existing sneaker manufacturing techniques. You know, we didn't want to reinvent the wheel daily, Bave says he can send it. Back to the company for a discount, this allows us to responsibly recycle them, recondition them and donate them to charities and refugee camps.

Thank you, this

young

entrepreneur built a business crushing bottles into sand. She co-founded what could be Louisiana. largest glass recycling operation and in about two years saved four million glass beer bottles from landfills and is increasing at a time when global sand supplies are running out, we are using sand at a faster rate than which may be natural. created for volunteers to use crushed glass to help rebuild the coast Francisca Troutman started the glass half full with her boyfriend in February 2020, when they were still college students, one night during college with a bottle of wine we knew he would finish in a landfill.

We decided that instead of continuing to complain about the problem and the lack of glass recycling, we would just do something about it, so we had this idea: with no waste management experience, no recycling experience, they raised about eighteen thousand dollars to cover the initial costs. including a machine that could grind one bottle at a time as this literal mountain of glass began to form a residential neighborhood, we're like, okay, you've got to do something here quick since they moved into this warehouse in August 2020, They received a non-stop flood of glass for recycling people can drop it off for free or pay to have it picked up once the can is full we will throw it in our Glass Mountain unless it is a special color it will be mixed here.

Colored bottles can be turned into special sand. that sells at a higher price, so this is blue sand made from Bombay gin bottles. Artists love to use it. People love to use it in their gardens, but most of the bottles are dumped into what Fran calls Glass Mountain, so Glass Mountain is always expanding and contracting. We always add glass and remove it to crush it. In the end, workers pick up the bottles with this loader and throw them into a crushing machine. Ed goes out on the conveyor belt and he's going to get on this conveyor belt and hit the hammers. where it will be crushed and then turned into a sort of sand and gravel mixture and tags.

The sprayer leaves behind some larger pieces of glass that are too big to use. Anything larger than 3 8 inches will be removed so we will include labels Metal lids Anything other than glass will come out of this process. They're still figuring out what to do with these leftovers. Newer models allow you to send this waste stream back through the system, so we are working to raise money. In order to get that new system in the warehouse, usable sand is also building up because a crucial piece of equipment is too small. You can really see the size difference compared to our machine, so our machine can process much faster than this one.

You can sift the sieve, filter out any label debris, and sort the litter by size and you simply scoop up the unsifted product, place it on top, and shake it all together until it separates into each of the five sizes. The largest glass screens. helps pay the bills the glass half full sells them as gravel some buyers mix it with the floor the smallest type of sand is a fine powder this is like the consistency of flour it is extremely soft I wish everyone could touch it and walk on it puts in sandbags the company gives people who use sandbags to place them against the doors of their houses, where anywhere water can get in because we are very prone to flooding here, among the dust and gravel, there is sand gross.

The kind friend and Max. It is used to rebuild the coast, so this is the size we would use for coastal restoration. You can see it's not sharp, so it's not going to cut me. In an event called a rollout, the Louisiana Coastal Restoration Coalition dumped about 10 tons of recycled sand. along Lake Pontchartrain, this is the battlefront that everyone is helping us protect today. Thanks for coming, Fran and Max, they handed out the sand and burlap bags that were donated by local coffee roasters. We like to be able to move it with Manpower and something like that. involve as many people as we can, it's a really beautiful thing to see Brandon Max hope that his story inspires others to make a difference.

I think this is more of a story of a community coming together to say "we demand change and we." We are not going to wait any longer, two people decided to start this and now over 2 million pounds of glass is out of a landfill and making a difference in other areas of South Africa. Two sisters discoveredhow to convert PVC into high quality PVC. end Home Goods PVC is one of the most common plastics in the world and although this material can be recycled over and over again, it is often not the case. That's what inspired these two sisters to launch their own business.

Moe is the artist behind Moe's Crib. actually he has a good diet his sister Michelle handles the business side of things or the other friends actually we are both Mo my African name is moshibudi which is a Mo and my sister's African name is morongwe and our last name is also m or mugoni so it really made It makes sense that we call it most cribs. Moe and Michelle source most of their raw materials from the wholesale company. He says Ubuntu runs most of the pipes through piles of broken PVC pipes sent to the scrap heap before they were sold like that.

They will definitely never be used. with its sole purpose for water or sewage etc. so I can take this one and even though they are rubbish for construction companies, they have the right amount of breakage for Mo and Michelle, it's like this defect right here is exactly what What are we searching for. because we love this kind of stuff, so we will definitely take this. These pipes are six meters long, so workers cut them to more manageable sizes. PVC pipes, short for polyvinyl chloride, are hard and durable, but can be heated and reshaped without loss. force and even a simple bonfire will be enough to do it the pipe comes into contact with the fire this is to do it so that it softens innocent mango nicknamed shrimp worked as a plumber before this installing pipes similar to those they now mix in baskets spins the pipe over the flame until it weakens into a viable substance.

This part of the process could expose workers to harmful fumes, but the company told us they plan to switch to a closed furnace sometime in 2023 with the help of a box cutter, then ties one end of the now flexible tube to an anchor and then Franz walks backwards, all in one smooth, deft motion, cutting it into thin strips almost as long as the entire yard. The strips are now ready to weave, but before we leave we need to create a frame for the basket. Bronze has been weaving baskets for over a decade. He is one of the company's 11 full-time employees, plus or minus an hour and a half of the entire process, it takes one meter of pipe to finish a flower pot, the laundry basket requires two meters of pipe, which makes Let each basket be a unique creation, right, right, chemists?

PVC was discovered in the 19th century after vinyl chloride gas was exposed to sunlight. It is used in construction. Vinyl records clean IV bags, even clothes, but some of the things that make them so functional also make them difficult to recycle. PVC pipes containing harmful additives such as lead and cadmium. that can contaminate other plastics destined for recycling, so it is necessary to separate them. Many large producers voluntarily eliminated several of these harmful elements before 2015. But most countries do not ban them completely. These pipes can be used for up to 100 years. Those ready for retirement still contain those dangerous chemicals, so many end up in landfills.

Mo and Michelle need pipes of a certain thickness for their weaving process. They are too thin and are not strong enough to support the fabric. too thick and they are too hard. They cut properly, so for years while collecting pipes, Mo and Michelle also ran into hundreds they couldn't use, making it difficult for the Sisters to expand as the business continued to grow and demand was greater. We needed to find alternative sources, so they partnered with pipe manufacturer Kusasa Mining Pressure Systems in 2019. Here, discarded pipes of almost any size can be recycled into exactly what the sisters need.

You can bring any type of pipe regardless of the color and, in fact, it goes through a regranulation process that lasts two to three millimeters per thickness, the granulator pulverizes the original pipes until they become a fine powder, we can relate. Kusasa adds lead-free wax and stabilizers to the mix, just as it does when manufacturing new or virgin PVC pipe. 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 a banana, you know, which is wrong, it's supposed to. they shouldn't be like this workers use water to regulate the temperature of the pipe The pipe hardens as the water cools it and then it is cut to the correct size and voila, the old PVC is now new PVC.

PVC is only a small part of our global plastics problem, but the meconi sisters are happy to do their part and we have discovered that this is a solution to this global environmental challenge we face and we are doing: a basket, a tray of grass, one chair at a time or one coconut at a time, he spent months of trial and error developing his recipe for cooking fuel made from coconut shells. of trees I thought either it works or it works, it needs to work, so I have to do everything I can to make it work.

She lost her adoptive family in a landslide when she was 17 years old. Before that, he spent years living on the streets dreaming of the day he could launch his own business, biobricks helped prevent deforestation because they are produced from biomass hazards, not produced from wood. He lives in a part of Sierra Leone that has lost 70 percent of its forest cover in the last five decades. The reason for deforestation is that people cut down trees to fuel their stoves. Tree roots are essential for containing the Earth during increasingly intense storms. You go from lush green mountains to dark brown death traps.

The question now is: can Alhaji convince the people of Freetown to trade wood? coconut briquette charcoal Coconuts are one of Freetown's favorite on-the-go snacks. Vendors end the day stuck with piles of shells that they need to get rid of somehow and that cost money. It was supposed to be waste that needed to be transported. to throw this away now, im going to pick it up for free alhaji says his company Rogue Style Trading collects about two metric tons of coconut waste per week and is aiming for 10 tons by the end of 2022. So this is the backbone of our products, This is good for us, we workers clean the shells and shells and dry them for about a week, then they cook them inside this steel drum, it is charred for about three four hours, we put out the fire with water, we have to wait for let them dry.

They pulverize the charred coconuts into a fine powder and add water plus a secret ingredient to bring it all together. Mixing is very difficult, so the whole process depends on the mixture. A small error in the formula. You have to start over four days these days. In fact, people who smoke hookah are their best customers these days. Alhaji's next big challenge is to increase his sales to reach people who will use his coconut briquettes as cooking fuel instead of cutting down trees. It's not easy, but it is necessary. At that time it is very difficult to build something great if it were not difficult, everyone would have done it, so his mother says that he wanted to be an entrepreneur since he was a child.

What they did, they searched Facebook, but all that felt very far away when Alhaji suddenly became a convert. the breadwinner of his family at 12 years old. I forgot about mom on Friday 22-20 yes, he left his town hoping to earn money to send home to his mother and his sister. I was just a kid who wanted to become someone but wasn't thinking clearly. I thought it was okay for me to move to Freedom, so without thinking about where I will stay, who will feed me, who will take care of me, but I moved, he lived on the street for four years until he found a stable job and a foster family that He took it seven to eight months after my adoption.

I lost my family he lived with during the landslide. More than 1,100 people died and three thousand more lost their homes. Alhaji was left with only a few dollars to his name, but he was desperate to do something to stop the deadly landslides in the decade before the tragedy. Landslides in Africa had already claimed thousands of lives. One of the reasons for the light of the Cosmos is the large amount of deforestation because the roots help maintain the soil. The ohati farm began obsessively. While researching ways to stop deforestation, he found videos on YouTube of entrepreneurs around the world making biomass briquettes to replace wood and charcoal.

He began saving money for an expensive mechanical extruder and perfected the recipe himself. He is a foreigner, but most people in Freetown still cook with whatever wood they can. Go up to someone and say, Hey, this is new, it's different from what you've been using, so it's a little difficult, but someday we'll get there. According to a study in the Philippines, one ton of cat biomass saves approximately 80 small trees and that can add up, but preserving trees is not enough part of the solution Yvonne Aki Sawyer became mayor of Freetown by campaigning on the promise of plant a million trees by the end of 2022.

She told us that alhaji's project makes her feel hopeful for the future, the work Elijah is doing is one way she sees solutions to this multifaceted problem of sanitation and environment in Calgary. Two brothers are doing their part by keeping broken skateboards out of landfills. Adrian and Martinez pool have been skating the streets of Alberta, Canada, for over 20 years. Now they have turned that hobby into a thriving business. At first we only built with the material we could find as if it were a garbage container. Construction sites and then also skateboards. Around 2 million skateboards end up in landfills every year after working on pool construction.

The brothers have spent the last decade recycling thousands of those boards into earrings, coffee tables and their signature bowls. The skateboards are made of maple wood. It goes through a special treatment that allows it to be peeled into thin sheets. Each board or deck has about seven layers of those sheets glued together, which makes deconstructing the boards a little tricky. They are extremely hard on equipment, mainly because they are made of hard maple. and then a lot of glue, but the quality of the wood leads to long-lasting products. Skateboards are the best plywood made because it is solid maple throughout.

Martinez collects broken boards from local skate shops every week. We will also get calls from Moms when they see our work and say: I have my son's boards in the garage and I'm going to throw them away, come get them, the first step is to remove the grip tape, ideally we would like to. We do it in the summer on a hot day and we just leave the boards in the sun for half an hour and that warms the glue enough so you can peel them off. The next step is to replace the boards on bare wood.

We need to remove the clear layer that you can see on top, as well as the graphic and anything left on them so the glue will adhere properly. We have cut them into all their congruent parts. The strips can become earrings, tables, credenzas or in this case, a bowl to make a bowl. Martínez stacks and glues the tails and noses. Each bowl takes 20 of these nose and tail sections. I start looking at them based on the size and the curvature that they have, and then We'll start with one that looks extra large, make sure they line up and look congruent so they laminate well, so this is basically the layout of what it's going to look like the bowl and what the colors will be.

To be there the boards are clamped for 24 hours and left to cure for a couple more days after that and then the corners are cut with the band saw and once that is done they are mounted on the lathe then it shapes and hollows them out. board block using slanted chisels Bowl gouges and scrapers Martínez makes bowls in batches of approximately 15. Each batch takes two to three weeks. Deck manufacturers use different veneers and dies on each deck, making each of Pool Brothers' products unique to skaters for decades. They have faced all sorts of negative stereotypes in film and television, often being portrayed as lazy and criminal, but the sport has gained respect over time and made its first Olympic appearance in 2021.

Fortunately, skateboarding went through this cycle of growth, so now skateboarding is as big as any Olympic sport and it has big title sponsors, it has big events, now generations of skaters who grow up playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater arestarting to give back to skaters like Ryan Flynn, whose online store is also

turning

old boards into new functional products that we like. works with our functional products, many things, from sunglasses to pool cues to screwdrivers, we like them, we like them to be used, we like them to have a real Second Life. Ryan hopes that his products will prompt others to think more about the environment, although we appreciate recycling and it's like something we've become, it's filtered down to other parts of our lives too, it's like we're more conscious, by just like the pool.

The brothers believe their efforts will make skaters consider what will happen after they finish their boards. I think we definitely inspired people to get into woodworking or try to recycle skateboards or that kind of thing. Hi, this is Will's story from the global waste team. We want to bring you more stories that look at

trash

and the creative ways people handle it. If you liked this video, please like and subscribe. We also read all the comments. If you have an idea for a video you would like to see, let us know. Just look at excerpts from some stories we've done about

young

entrepreneurs.

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