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Recycling factory that makes plastic trash greener than trees
An Ecopost employee at work at the company’s factory in Baba Dogo in August. The factory also makes flower pots, road signage, floor decking and truck flooring among other items. PHOTO | DIANA NGILA |
What you need to know:
- In March 2010, Lorna Rutto co-founded EcoPost Ltd, a firm which uses plastic waste to manufacture poles for fencing, landscaping, road signage and construction of small structures.
- EcoPost recycles 769.2 kilogrammes of plastic waste daily or 20 tonnes every month, churning out 100 poles every day which is equivalent to saving 10 mature trees.
Many people thought Ms Lorna Rutto was out of her mind when in 2009 she quit her well-paying job at a bank to pursue her teenage hobby — moulding plastic into ornaments and selling them to friends.
Using her personal savings and a Sh500,000 ($5,813) jackpot she had bagged that year in a business proposal writing competition dubbed Enablis Business Award, Ms Rutto establish a small factory to turn plastic into land-scaping products.
In March 2010, she co-founded EcoPost Ltd, a firm which uses plastic waste to manufacture poles for fencing, landscaping, road signage and construction of small structures such as kennels and poultry sheds.
It was a plunge of faith for the Nakuru-born go-getter and after multiple trials and errors, mostly errors; the budding entrepreneur finally cracked the recipe for turning plastic trash into cash from the factory based at the Kariobangi Light Industry in Nairobi.
“When I was in school, I could heat plastic as we played around and soon, I realised that the molten plastic dropped in a small container took the shape of the container and when dried and removed, it made beautiful ornaments. I did this repeatedly and started selling to my friends.”
Little did Ms Rutto, who holds a degree in accounting from the Africa Nazarene University, know that her recycling venture would pioneer a new maxim: plastic is greener than trees.
It was always unlikely that plastic waste, considered an environmental hazard, could hold the key to protecting Kenya’s forests.
“Recycling plastic to provide an alternative to timber thus preventing the cutting down of trees is greener,” says the 30 year old.
The twin advantages offered by recycling plastics is that this helps to tackle the challenge of waste as evidenced by plastic and polythene litter in many Kenyan towns and the plastic poles act as a substitute to lumber, thereby saving trees in a country where the forest cover is below the 10 per cent of land mass recommended by the United Nations.
EcoPost recycles 769.2 kilogrammes of plastic waste daily or 20 tonnes every month, churning out 100 poles every day which is equivalent to saving 10 mature trees.
