Second Saturday Shout-out: Nzambi Matee
Welcome to our first edition of the Second Saturday Shout-out! We are very excited to start this project in an attempt to flood news feeds with refreshing, inspiring, and all around feel good stories.
I had to begin this adventure with the one lady who inspired it’s existence. When I first read the story about Nzambi Matee, I just knew that not enough people knew about her and the amazing work she is doing in Kenya.
Nzambi, a 29-year-old trained engineer and biochemist, quit her job in the oil industry and founded a startup company (Gjenge Makers) to convert waste into sustainable materials. She has found a way to create a lightweight and low-cost brick that is made of recycled plastic mixed with sand. These plastic-sand mixed bricks are said to be stronger than your typical concrete bricks and are currently being used to build houses, schools and streets across Africa.
Her company repurposes close to 500 kilograms of plastic waste a day and turns that plastic into about 500-1000 bricks. Nzambi noted that so far her company has recycled 20 metric tons of plastic waste, and their goal is to push that value to 50 by the end of this year!
“It is absurd that we still have this problem of providing decent shelter – a basic human need,” discussed Nzambi. "Plastic is a material that is misused and misunderstood. The potential is enormous, but its after life can be disastrous."
According to the United Nations Environment Program, globally, the population purchases 1 million plastic drinking bottles every minute, and every year, up to 5 trillion single-use plastic bags are handled. Nzambi was inspired to launch her startup venture after routinely noticing plastic bags strewn along her neighborhood streets in Nairobi.
As explained on the UNEP’s website, "through trial and error, she and her team learned that some plastics bind together better than others. Her project was given a boost when [Nzambi] won a scholarship to attend a social entrepreneurship training program in the United States of America. With her paver samples packed in her luggage, she used the material labs in the University of Colorado Boulder to further test and refine the ratios of sand to plastic."
"Nzambi Matee’s innovation in the construction sector highlights the economic and environmental opportunities when we move from a linear economy, where products, once used, are discarded, to a circular one, where products and materials continue in the system for as long as possible."
Nzambi epitomizes CitriClean’s value of frugality and we hope her story is shared all throughout the world. Maybe we all should take a page out of Nzambi’s book, and try to make a difference, one brick at a time.
