Tanzania’s urban areas do not have formalized systems for the disposal of used plastic bottles and bags. Piles of plastic waste accumulate in waterways and along streets in neighborhoods across Dar es Salaam, creating breeding environments for malaria-carrying mosquitos, allowing unsafe chemical seepage into water sources and soils, and developing generally unsanitary conditions in dense urban areas. To address environmental impacts of plastic use and production in Dar es Salaam and provide youth with simple after-school income-generating activities and training in personal and environment health management, EcoVentures International (EVI) and the Environmental Enterprise Development Initiative (EEDI), a coalition of cross-sectoral local organizations originally organized by EVI, worked together on a basic value chain assessment of the plastics recycling industry.
There are several plastics companies in Dar es Salaam manufacturing plastic shoes, buckets, and fences. Until 2005, these plastics companies imported the virgin plastic inputs for the manufacturing process. The EVI/EEDI assessment highlighted micro and small enterprise opportunities for unemployed youth in processing used plastics for recycling and reuse in the local plastics industry. An EEDI partner, Environment Based Poverty Alleviation, established a start-up enterprise for plastics collection and recycling, beginning by working with a few older jobless youths sourcing plastics from dump sites.
In order to reach the large volumes of plastics demanded, the enterprise tapped into the youth population to provide them with an easy way to contribute to the clean-up of their community, instilling a sense of social responsibility, and to generate income in a way that would not interfere with school activities. Youth are trained in basic protective health and sanitation skills and provided with protective equipment to use when doing their individual collection.
As the enterprise develops it has been able to take advantage of relationships with key market actors and grow its operations, first by contracting trucks to transport the plastic to a sorting facility. Financing from plastics manufacturers who used the lower-cost recycled plastic product facilitated investment into recycling equipment and expanded their capacity for production of recycled plastic pellets that had even more value to the plastics manufacturers in the region. The recycling enterprise has retooled its business model to make plastics processing and pelletization its primary function, and it continues to contract a network of youth plastics collectors to feed the demand for plastic waste while providing an important service of removing harmful waste plastics from communities, enabling youth to create a safer community while contributing to their own and their families’ well-being.
Kate Davenport
kate@eco-ventures.org
