The benefit of our Micro Recycling Plants is one
they are portable.
So the objective behind them from the get-go
was to have them positioned at the source of a problem
or at the center of a community.
We designed our Micro Recycling Plants
- which is basically a 40-foot container -
so it can be picked up and moved to any location.
So if there's a massive storm surge
and we need to deploy them at a harbour or
into an estuary location to clean up the plastics
we can do that.
Secondly, they part or fully process the materials on site
which again benefits the community financially
but it also allows us to create
a more superior weight volume metric.
What they do is they
actually take the plastics and they clean it,
they wash it, they separate it and they granulate it or flake it.
And they sell it back to us as a pre-qualified product.
So we know it's clean.
We know it's separated by product type and
we know it's separated by color.
Our Micro Recycling Plants create
two to three direct jobs
which are your owner / operators and
then generally, we see potentially
up to four or five people
working actually at the Micro Recycling Plant
on a day-to-day basis.
They are autonomous stand alone businesses.
They are designed to basically cover their own costs
and generate profit within that business module
run by those independently owned and operated entrepreneurs
and to complement our supply chain.
My name is Philile Nene
yes one of the founders of Women On Waste.
I live in Willowfontein, in the same environment,
born here and raised here.
Plastic is a very big problem within our our environment.
In order for us to stop complaining about what the government is doing,
we took it among ourselves to see what we can do with the plastic.
LOTS was involved with Ocean Technologies from the very beginning
when we started talking about their container concept and
we realised that there was going to be a need for training
in order to provide the sustainability of these models.
We realised that there's lots of projects that
sort of get started and then fall down.
So we are emphasising mainly on
the training, mentorship and support of these businesses
to keep it going.
The business has changed my life a lot.
Firstly, educational wise;
secondly, the way I think about plastic; and thirdly,
it changed my position within the community.
After starting this business,
I learned a lot of things.
To be patient
because it took us a while to run this business.
I am excited now because we are running.
My name is Njabulo Dhlamini.
I am a Project Manager at Ocean Plastic Technologies.
I help the company's operators
and the community involvement is very important
because what we are doing, we are doing in the community.
So it is crucial that we inform the community
about plastic and waste management
and how to deal with it.
When we last looked at it, we generally had an impact of
anything from 40 to 60 people.
If you take one of our conventional recycling plants
working in a peri-urban environment,
you're talking about potentially five to 10 grandmother's
or "gogo's" collecting plastic.
Each of those gogo's is leveraging off a network of another four or five people.
And then obviously we've got what we call our direct clients,
which is people bringing bags of plastic into the container
weighing it and being paid you know small amounts
of money which are generally sort of in your single digits
which they're using as a way to supplement their income.
Our claimers
bring us plus minus 50 bags per week.
A lot of gogo's are supplying us the plastic
Most of our grandmother's
are depending on this money.
They are not working so they're using this money
to put food on the table.
This business has made a lot of change within the community
because some parents send their kids to collect,
to supply their plastics.
When we are paying them, the kids,
they're going to the shops to buy groceries.
The gogo's are the one's who are
supporting their families and
it's making a huge difference in the community.
Where the MRPs are located - where they are being set up
there is visible evidence that the MRPs are operating very nicely
because the plastic that has been seen before
lying on the ground
has now been reduced.
The community is very engaged
with how we we pick up the plastic,
how we monetise the plastic
so it is very useful for the communities
to have the MRPs in their sites or in their locations.
Our end game is to try and establish
a global network of Micro Recycling Plants and
we have different models to suit different regions and different economies.
So for example, we're busy building out a
micro recycling cluster for the US market and for the European
and more sort of developed country markets.
It's a much more sophisticated recycling plant
to suit those economies and to suit those conditions.
We work in the more developed markets,
working with military veterans that have retired
and are looking for a supplementary income but who also
have a phenomenal skill set that they add to what we're doing with our Micro Recycling Plants.
If we can create that network and that legacy,
we'll have achieved what we want to do.
I see this business in two years time
having more branches around the country
and creating more job opportunities.
Women on Waste in two years time,
Women on Waste will be successful
all over South Africa
all over South Africa!