00:01Every plastic bottle that you trash can either pollute our streets or create value.
00:15My name is Rita Idayai. I'm the founder and CEO of EcoBatter, where we are turning waste into opportunities.
00:22So what happens to waste, especially household waste in Nigeria, is terrible.
00:27You know, right now, 90 percent, according to World Bank statistics, of the waste that we generate in our homes end up burned on open dumps or disposed along drainage ways.
00:36How we manage our waste currently contributes the third largest to our greenhouse gas emissions in Nigeria.
00:49Where we are is a rented property. And so we've divided the area, you know, to handle different materials.
00:54So here you have the PET plastics. Over there you have the, we call them ad plastics.
01:01So PP, HDPE, different types of plastic. As you can see, the broken chairs, just ad plastics generally.
01:07So this is our sort of processing area.
01:11We have the baling machine that we use in compressing the plastic bottles into bales.
01:15So these are called bales. So the compressing it makes the cost of logistics better.
01:21So that we can then send them over to Lagos to the off takers and manufacturers that use them.
01:26So the women that we work with here, you know, are mostly local community women, housewives, just some of them are widows.
01:29Just, again, typically underserved women in Kujie community.
01:47So what the women do here is that they sort out the plastic bags that we collect.
01:54So pure autosaturated, single-use plastic bags.
01:57Process it and weave it on traditional floor looms into fabric that we've called plabric.
02:04And then these plabrics, we make them into finished products like bags, like shoes, mats, and even more recently, clothing.
02:11I don't know, where are the men that are sewing? They say we don't have any man.
02:23Because they don't have the requisite skills, the opportunities are way limited for them.
02:29Societal norms also keep them within certain limits.
02:33So these are women that either have children, you know, are from a certain region or a certain belief,
02:37and naturally or societally, they can't even go, you know, past their community to find work.
02:43They have to be around.
02:44And our program enables them to be able to live their lives the way the society has, you know, created for them,
02:52but also then go the extra length of making income.
03:07The biggest challenge that I faced starting EcoBata was actually knowledge.
03:12When I decided that I wanted to do this, I didn't even know who to sell the material to.
03:16I didn't know anything. I didn't understand the sales circle.
03:19There was so much information that I didn't know and I couldn't get online.
03:22When I did my research on the technologies that, you know, were important in recycling, there was vending machine.
03:28I remember calling my tech friend to say, can we build this? That was the question, right?
03:33Can we build this? And him in his stupidities, he said, of course, we can build it.
03:36We've not built it before, but if it's something that is anywhere in the world, we can replicate it.
03:41And so that was how the journey started.
03:48This is a reverse vending machine, the first locally manufactured one in Nigeria and in fact, in Africa.
03:54So when you come to this machine with your plastic or beverage can, you press on Start.
04:00When you press Start, then you put in your bottles one after the other, as many as you've come to the machine with.
04:07You scan the QR code, it takes you to our mobile application where you can then transfer the money that you've earned
04:12into your bank account, buy airtime electricity or data.
04:16Currently in Abuja, we have 26 of this machine and in Lagos, we have two of these machines.
04:24People would think recycling was only for the poor.
04:28But with this machine now, like, first it's neat, it's clean, it's technology, right?
04:32So everybody's interested. Prior to now, we had, I think, about 3,000 people on our platform.
04:37Now we have close to 13,000 people within one year.
04:41Honestly, I would say that just changing the narrative of who should recycle and what recycling is about
04:46is the biggest impact that this mission has made.
04:50So my hope and vision for the next generation, you know, when it comes to environmental protection and recycling
04:56is that they see that it's everybody's responsibility and you can start from anywhere.
05:01So knowing that from scratch, from zero nearer, from squirting in a place,
05:06I've built something that, you know, is a sort of livelihood to this number of people
05:11is something I'm most proud of.
05:12Knowing that this smuggie I've built something just amazing is a pride, a thing of pride for me.
