Meet The Lady That Quit Her Job To Start Creating Pavers, Which Are A Combination Of Plastic & Sand

Nzambi Matee is a Kenyan trained mechanical engineer, sustainability enthusiast, plastic waste recycling expert and a social entrepreneur.

Nzambi is the Founder ofq Gjenge Makers Limited Company.

In 2017, she quit her job as a data analyst and set up a small lab in her mother’s back yard. There, she began creating and testing pavers, which are a combination of plastic and sand.

Through trial and error, she and her team learned that some plastics bind together better than others. Her project was given a boost when Matee won a scholarship to attend a social entrepreneurship training programme 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.

She found new ways of converting waste into sustainable materials.

Her company Gjenge Makers’ is creating lightweight and low-cost building material that is made of recycled plastic with sand to make bricks that are stronger than concrete material.

They get plastic waste from packaging factories or buys it from other recyclers, mixes with sand as the plastic like the binder.

The company has three machines, the extruder does the mixing of plastic waste, with sand, at very high temperatures and then the press compresses it.

Gjenge Makers produces about 500-1000 bricks per day, “recycling close to 500 kilograms of plastic waste a day.”

The paving stones applied in houses, schools or streets is highly durable and diminishes its maintaining cost.

According to UNEP, globally, people purchase 1 million plastic drinking bottles in every minute while up to 5 trillion single-use plastic bags are used annually.

In 2020 Matee was named Young Champion of the Earth 2020 Africa at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The award “provides seed funding and mentorship to promising environmentalists as they tackle the world’s most pressing challenges.”

Source: linkedIn

Email: elora.akpotosevbe@yahoo.com