Earth Day, formerly known as Earth Day Network is a yearly event that takes place every April 22 to show support for environmental protection.
The first edition was held on Wednesday, April 22, 1970, and now includes multiple events taking place around the world in over 193 countries with up to 1 billion people involved.
Earth Day 2021 is themed, Restore Our Earth and it features five main programs: The Great Global CleanUp, Climate Literacy, Food and Environment, Canopy Project and Global Earth Challenge.
To commemorate, this year’s Earth Day, we have come up with a list of Nigerian startups that are deploying innovative solutions to clean up the environment for a sustainable Earth.
Scrapays
The cleantech startup connects waste producers (individuals and enterprises) with independent recyclable material collection businesses so they can dispose of their sorted waste efficiently with a return.
The community is powered by hosts who have access to spaces, they provide collection outlets allowing for wide decentralization of collectors.
The cleantech startup facilitates a decentralized recovery model of recyclable material in developing nations.
Founded in 2019 Scrapays allows individuals to sell their scrap and scrapable materials at premium prices through a multi-use platform (USSD, Mobile and Web).
Basically the startup deploys a fund and operations management software to informal small and medium scale businesses that are involved in a material collection to mitigate typical losses involved in the supply value chain.
OkwuEco
This startup acts as a marketplace platform for smooth solid waste disposal so as to encourage recycling,
OkwuEco enables users buy and sell waste, providing a marketplace for all sorts of waste. The Jos-based startup deploys an image recognition technique to identify and sort out waste.
With its backend analysis, users can easily get paid as their pickups or drop-offs are automatically scheduled irrespective of location or language.
OkwuEco is flexible with stable pricing and reduced cost of waste management. The OkwuEco portal leverages Global Positioning System to facilitate logistics and data collection.
In all this, the startup makes money by charging a percentage on transactions executed via its web-based platform.
Wecyclers
Wecyclers gives low-income communities in developing countries a chance to capture value from waste and clean up their neighborhoods through incentive-based recycling.
People living in slum conditions without formal waste collection are subject to increased flooding, disease spread, and psychological stress that results from unmanaged trash heaps.
Wecyclers runs on teamwork, using an incentive-based program in the megacity’s low-income areas (where municipal services often don’t reach) and empowering local citizens to help solve Lagos’s waste problem.
The eco startup is determined to make recycling a popular practice in Lagos and across the African continent by helping people to see trash as a valuable resource.
Wecyclers collects the recyclable rubbish, the items are sorted, bagged and sold to recycling factories in Nigeria that use the material to make new products such as pillow stuffing.
Recyclan
Is a global sustainable packaging company involved in the ethical recovery and recycling of plastic waste into food packaging.
The startup hotwash, sanitize and reprocess PET plastic products that have been discarded as waste and turn them into the highest-grade recycled PET product that can be reused in the food and beverage industry.
Doing this ensures that Recyclan conserves energy, greenhouse gases, reduces air and water pollution.
Leveraging state-of-the-art technology in its recycling process enables the startup to conserve energy by 30% thereby being more efficient, maximize output and minimize cost.
The startup’s operations span across collecting and sorting, baling, crushing/granulating, hot & cold washing and eventually sheet extrusion & thermoforming.
Greenhill
This startup is offering opportunities for people living in densely populated, low-income areas within Lagos state to capture value from their daily generated waste.
In exchange for recyclable waste, Greenhill offers redeemable GREENPOINTS to post-consumers, which can be converted to items of value such as, groceries, bill payment, household items and cash.
Greenhill recovers recyclables from sources of consumption in order to divert large volumes of waste to recycling value chains and increase recycling rates.
The startup offers household, school and corporate recycling.
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