09/13/2021
Via :
“Kenyan engineer and entrepreneur Nzambi Matee is using science to solve two huge crises at once.
Matee’s home city of Nairobi has more plastic waste than it knows what to do with — about 500 metric tons each day, and not all of it is recycled (or recyclable). So Matee has developed a creative solution. Matee takes non-recyclable plastic waste from factories, heats it, mixes it with sand, and compresses the material into bricks. These bricks, Matee says, are anywhere between five to seven times stronger than concrete — and her startup company, Gjenge Makers, has transformed more than 20 tons of waste into bricks since 2017.
But that’s not all: Matee is now in the process of adding more workers in order to churn out more bricks than ever before. The bricks, says Matee, will help create low-cost housing for Kenyans, which is currently in extremely high demand.”
