Ivory Coast generates more than 40,000 tonnes of plastic waste per year, according to the Ivorian Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development. More than half of this waste is poured directly into the streets, with just about a fifth of it being sorted and recycled.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Colombian social enterprise, Conceptos Plasticos, teamed up to convert the plastic waste in Côte d'Ivoire into modular, easy-to-assemble, low-cost plastic bricks for classrooms. According to the Executive Director of UNICEF, Henrietta Fore, the plant will be at the forefront of intelligent and scalable solutions to address some of the key educational challenges facing children and communities in Africa.

Conceptos Plasticos empowers the plastic supply chain by dignifying the position of women recyclers, changing society's behavior towards the value of discarded plastic, mitigating the effects of climate change, improving access to education for thousands of Ivorian children, generating actions to promote gender equity, based on fair trade of the material to reduce extreme poverty rates.