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This collection is part of Footprints Africa's work to build a comprehensive database of circular economy initiatives in Africa. 

This is a result of the collaboration with the <a href="https://www.acen.africa" target="_blank">African Circular Economy Network (ACEN)</a>, as part of the programme to support the circular economy transition in Africa. Footprints Africa's vision is that businesses can be a force for good at scale. Their mission is to advance sustainable, scalable and inclusive approaches to development of local African economies. Footprints Africa supports SMEs to adopt future-friendly practices, such as those inspired by the circular economy, to address the challenges of growth and create jobs. 

This open-source dataset features well over 500 cases and 200 examples of policies and laws and intent to collect inspiring examples of initiatives from across Africa, in order to inform the global dialogue, which is largely focused on the European and American context. 

To learn more about Africa's initiatives and content to accelerate the transition to a circular economy, visit https://www.footprintsafrica.co/



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Footprints Africa

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CAT Africa

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This collection comes from the <a href="https://www.circle-economy.com/circular-jobs-initiative/" target="_blank">Circular Jobs Initiative</a>, an initiative of Circle Economy.

The workforce is an essential lever for transforming our economy from linear to circular. The Circular Jobs Initiative aims to maximise the employment opportunities offered by the circular economy. It provides practical support and insights to businesses and governments that want to adopt circular strategies that have a positive social impact.The Circular Jobs Initiative works through three focus areas: 

- Upskilling the workforce

- Quality of work

- Inclusive job opportunities 

CJI has defined circular jobs as any occupation that directly involves or indirectly supports one of the strategies of the circular economy. It distinguishes between three types of circular jobs: core, enabling and indirectly circular jobs.

**Core circular jobs** are all jobs that ensure the closure of raw material cycles, including jobs in repair, renewable energy, waste and resource management. 

**‍Enabling circular jobs** are jobs that remove barriers for and enable the acceleration and upscaling of core circular activities, including jobs that arise in leasing, education, design and digital technology. 

**Indirectly circular jobs** are jobs that occur in other sectors that do not play a direct role in furthering the transition to the circular economy but can still adopt circular strategies. They include jobs that provide services to core circular strategies, including jobs in information services, logistics and the public sector.

The Knowledge Hub Collection includes examples of circular jobs, publications, reports, case studies and policies different organisations, governments and businesses are already using to advocate for a person-centred circular economy. 

Visit the <a href="https://www.circle-economy.com/circular-jobs-initiative/" target="_blank">Circular Jobs Initiative</a>

Visit the <a href="http://jobsmonitor.circle-economy.com/" target="_blank">Circular Jobs Monitor</a>

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Circular Jobs Initiative

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Business case

Impact on the quantity or quality of jobs, and shifts in the labour market

Jobs

Minimise waste through diversion: Instead of sending waste to landfill, it is redirected into other industrial processes for handling, treatment, recycling, recovery, or reuse in various forms. 

Minimise waste through design: At the outset of a process of project, plan and design such that there is zero waste or minimal waste during production, use, and at end of life. 

Minimise Waste (SDG12)

Contributing to the improvement of biodiversity including species diversity, total number of protected species, and ecosystem health

Biodiversity

Producing building materials and finished and semi-finished building products for construction

Construction Materials and Products

Engage with the local community where facilities or offices are located

Community collaboration

Transforming waste products, materials for reuse within other industries

Open loop upcycling

Using waste materials that have been processed and recycled to produce new products within other industries

Using open loop recycled materials

Impacts

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Industries

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The principles of a circular economy concern designing out waste, regenerating ecosystems and keeping items in use. Decoupling the economy from material flows—improving the rate of resource productivity faster than the economic growth rate—is also a consistent guide. By evolving with the growing number of applications of circular economy principles, and consolidating these strategies across thematic areas, Circle Economy’s Key Elements Framework (KE) renders the elements of the circular economy salient and serves as a basis to derive contextual strategies and interventions. 


The Framework consists of:
- Core Elements: Activities directly handling product or material flows; and uniquely,
- Enabling Elements: those that remove obstacles for core actors.


Key elements of the circular economy

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Circle Economy's framework of strategies and activities that define the circular economy

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Based on the work of [Bocken et al. (2016)](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309699661_Product_design_and_business_model_strategies_for_a_circular_economy), the Four Flows Framework serves as a simple framework for managing resource flows in a circular economy by using less (Narrow), using for longer (Slow), using again (Cycle), and using clean, regenerative materials and energy (Regenerate).

These different principles of circular economy can be applied to our socioeconomic metabolism: we can design stocks like buildings, infrastructure, machinery, and vehicles to be rich resource mines for the future, and design manufactured goods and consumables to be cycled and made regenerative. Furthermore, the focus must also centre on getting more value out of fewer materials. Achieving the aims of a circular economy—minimising material use, regenerating the Earth, and preventing material losses—can be done through these four key strategies mentioned above.

Source: Circle Economy. (2023). *[The circularity gap report 2023](https://www.circularity-gap.world/2023)* (p.22). Amsterdam: Circle Economy. 

Four Flows Framework

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Several media reports refer to her as a reference figure in plastic waste recycling in Kenya. Lorna Rutto, just in her early thirties, has decided for a few years now to wage a real battle against plastic. “We have a joke that says that plastic is our national flower: it flies everywhere, lies everywhere. In our country, a large part of the population does not have access to toilets, so we defecate in the open.
In fact, people take plastic bags with them and ease themselves in the open air then they throw it away, that’s all. It is quite possible that with the wind a bag like this could hit you in the face,” Lorna told the online newspaper The Indu. She therefore decided to set up Ecopost in 2009. With its 40 employees, it transforms plastic waste into fence posts every day into recycled plastic “wood”. This product is an alternative to the popular wooden fence posts in Kenya.
Lorna wanted to save the environment from the influence of plastic. Her activity allows her to help clear Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, of plastic waste that “sticks to her skin”. The city alone produces 10,000 tonnes of plastic waste per day. Groups of young people and women collect them and sell them to Lorna Rutto. The latter mixes them with sawdust to obtain building materials. The wooden parts designed by Ecopost are used in the manufacture of floor tiles, refugee shelters, slums and traffic signs. It is a more durable solution because it is immune to any termite attack, which is very common in East Africa.
Producing poles from plastic waste also allows Lorna to reduce deforestation, since it will no longer be necessary to cut trees to make a house. This is a beneficial action, especially in Kenya, where forests represent only 2% of the country’s total area. In fact, Lorna’s research has revealed that nearly 200,000 pieces of wood are found in Kenyan markets. She thinks she can better contain this phenomenon, because according to her, “about thirty pieces produced by Ecopost make it possible to save 1 tree in full maturity.”
In 2011, Lorna received the Cartier Women’s Initiative Award for her fight. In 2017, the young eco-entrepreneur was one of nine winners of the Sathya Sai Sri Prize for Human Excellence. Lorna Rutto had the privilege of being selected most recently as one of the 40 finalists of the Africa Women Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum. The winners will be announced in November 2018. Lorna will still be honoured, perhaps….
Luchelle Feukeng


Nairobi, Kenya – Before the sun peaks over the horizon, Margaret Wambui is hard at work, trudging over hills of rancid waste at the Dandora landfill on the eastern outskirts of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.
She digs through freshly discarded refuse, meticulously segregating plastic bottles and depositing them into separate bags to sell on to ‘collectors’ who are positioned around the dumpsite.
Michael Kiteme is one of those collectors. He stands at the entrance of the landfill, supervising a group of women who further separate plastic bottles by colour– white in one heap, blue in another, clear in another and so on – to sell on to an aggregator who then sells the waste on to recyclers.
Kiteme has been an informal cog in Kenya’s plastic recycling trade for more than two decades. But in the past two years, his focus has shifted exclusively to one type of plastic: single-use polyethylene terephthalate or PET.
“I sell nearly two tonnes of PET every week, all from this dumpsite,” he tells Al Jazeera. “The value of waste plastic seems to have gone up in recent times.”
That’s because an industry-funded entity – Kenya PET Recycling Company (PETCO) – financially incentivizes collectors like Kiteme to pour their energies into gathering discarded single-use plastic bottles.
Collectors get 19 Kenyan shillings for every kilogramme of PET they sell to recyclers. PETCO then chips in a top-up of 5 Kenyan shillings (roughly $0.05), bringing the payday to 24 Kenyan shillings per kilogramme.
But critics say PETCO is not doing nearly enough to tackle Kenya’s plastic bottle problem.
The evidence is clear in and around the nation’s cities.  Discarded PET bottles line roadsides and drainage ditches like confetti.  Swathes of rivers flow beneath floating canopies of the stuff – waste that eventually ends up in lakes and oceans.
During the rainy season, the problem becomes dire when plastic waste clogs drainage systems, contributing to mass flooding.
“A vast amount of plastic waste is still ending up in landfills, or worse yet, getting into drainage systems,”  Dr Vincent Madadi, a chemistry lecturer at the University of Nairobi, told Al Jazeera.
In the absence of promised infrastructure, the burden of recycling falls on ordinary Kenyans and a patchwork of informal sorters, collectors and buyers [Al Jazeera: Courtesy of Pauline Mpungu]
Bold bans but not enough to solve the problem
In 2017, Kenya moved to the forefront of the global war on single-use plastics when it outlawed the manufacturing, sale and distribution of plastic carrier bags.
The country built on that progress this year when a ban on single-use plastics in protected areas took effect in June.
Though the law signals progress, it only covers national parks, beaches and conservation areas. And there are still no laws requiring producers of PET plastics to take responsibility for managing the waste their products generate.
In 2018, Kenya’s National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) tried to extend the plastic bag ban to include single-use plastic containers – like bottles – made from PET.
But the corporate giants that produce and profit from PET sold the government on a self-regulated, industry-funded solution – which became PETCO.
Formed in 2018, PETCO is supposed to subsidise the collection and recycling of single-use plastics in a country where there is no government-funded infrastructure for processing a never-ending tsunami of it.
But PETCO has fallen short of its promise to protect the environment, say critics.
“[PETCO is] a scheme aimed at hoodwinking the government so that it wouldn’t institute the ban, as they knew that would force them to come up with alternative investments,” Amos Burudi Wemanya of Greenpeace Africa told Al Jazeera.
Dandora landfill in Nairobi Kenya [Al Jazeera: Courtesy of Pauline Mpungu]
Few members, mounting waste
PETCO is supposed to bankroll infrastructure to help consumers segregate plastics and streamline the recycling process. But to date, that infrastructure has failed to materialise.
The company says that is because membership is purely voluntary, despite NEMA pledging in 2018 to make PETCO membership mandatory for all companies engaged in the plastics value chain.
“Kenya has got eight PET converters, but only one of them is a member,” PETCO CEO Joyce Gachungi tells Al Jazeera. “About 900 companies bottle drinking water in PET containers, but only eight of these are our members since there’s no law in Kenya that compels companies involved in the plastic value chain to join the organisation.”
Petco raises roughly $100,000 annually from membership fees, said Gachungi, far short of the $500,000 PETCO says is needed to recycle every plastic bottle produced in the country.
In the absence of promised infrastructure, the burden of recycling falls on ordinary Kenyans and a patchwork of sorters, collectors and buyers who simply cannot keep up with the volume of waste produced.
The shortfall is staggering. NEMA Director for Compliance and Enforcement, Zephaniah Ouma, told Al Jazeera that Kenya recycles only 15 percent of all the plastic waste it produces.
Wemanya reckons it is far lower. “I think Kenya is recycling two percent of what is generated,” he said.
High or low, both estimates place Kenya well behind schedule to meet the government’s stated goal of recycling 80 percent of plastic waste by 2030.
And Kenya’s plastic problem is compounded by other countries’ waste. After China shut its borders to most plastic waste imports in 2018, Kenya started taking in more of it.
Though the country has pledged to curb those imports, pressure is reportedly building from beyond its borders for it to become more plastic-waste friendly.
A letter from the American Chemistry Council – which represents major US petroleum firms – was seen by the Associated Press and pushed for Kenya to become a hub for distributing US-made plastics to the rest of Africa as part of a bilateral trade deal with the US.
Workers at Hui Commercial Epz Limited, a plastic recycling company in Nairobi, Kenya [Al Jazeera: Courtesy of Pauline Mpungu]
‘Throwaway culture’
Kenya offers corporate tax breaks to incentivize recycling efforts, including a value-added tax (VAT) exemption for products made from recycled materials. But environmental activists say the approach simply won’t work given the scale of the problem.
“Out of all the plastic that has ever been produced globally, research shows that only nine percent has been recycled so far,” said Wemanya. “This has mostly happened in more developed countries with requisite infrastructure. Now imagine a country like Kenya saying that it is going to recycle its plastic. That is not plausible.”
PETCO member Coca-Cola – which for the last two years has been named among the top three most notorious international corporate plastic polluters by the Break Free from Plastic movement – told Al Jazeera that it has no plans to phase out PET from its product line, and is instead focusing on recovering and recycling it.
“All packaging has a potential environmental impact, so it’s not as simple as saying one format is better than another,” Emily Waita Macharia, director of Public Affairs & Sustainability at Coca-Cola East and Central Africa, told Al Jazeera.  “There are advantages to PET [plastic bottles]. It’s lightweight, resealable and has a lower carbon footprint than many packaging formats when a circular economy is created, which is our goal.”
NEMA is adamant that it will pursue an outright ban on plastic bottles if Kenya’s plastic waste problem continues to fester.
“We’ve pronounced our intentions to [impose] a ban on plastic bottles unless the situation improves,” said Ouma.
But Wemanya believes only a nationwide ban on single-use plastics will compel industry to find effective solutions and end the “throwaway” culture it perpetuates.
“Today, almost every Kenyan has a water bottle,” he said. “If only the industry would innovate around this by placing water dispensers at the points where they sell their bottled water for people to refill their bottles instead of picking up a new disposable bottle every time they need to quench their thirst.”
Source: Al Jazeera

  






 

Based in Kenya, EcoPost's technology takes 100 percent plastic waste and turns it into aesthetic, durable, and environmentally friendly lumber for use in applications ranging from fencing to construction and outdoor furniture. EcoPost's lumber does not rot and cannot be eaten by termites. It can be cut, drilled, and nailed just as easily as wooden timber using the same woodworking tools, and it outlasts the lifespan of timber. EcoPost addresses the environmental challenges of urban waste management, deforestation, and climate change, as well as the social challenge of unemployment by hiring locally. To date, EcoPost has created 50 direct and 5,000 indirect jobs, has re-used 3 million kilograms of plastic waste, and has saved 850 acres of forest, further mitigating climate change.





 







  
 

Kenya

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Nairobi

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Ecopost

EcoPost

<p>Ecopost is a Kenyan enterprise that converts plastic waste into construction materials, by buying plastic waste collected by locals and then turning it into material applied to various uses such as floor tiles, fence posts, or traffic signs. Through their business model, the organisation has increased income-earning opportunities for the locals, reduced deforestation, and reused plastic waste that would otherwise end up harming the environment.&nbsp;</p>