Young Egyptians battle plastic plague
CAIRO: Entrepreneurial young Egyptians are helping combat their country’s huge plastic waste problem by recycling junk-food wrappers, water bottles and similar rubbish that usually ends up in landfills or the Nile.
At a factory on the outskirts of Cairo, run by their startup Tilegreen, noisy machines gobble up huge amounts of plastic scraps of all colours, shred them and turn them into a thick liquid.
The sludge - made from all kinds of plastic, even single-use shopping bags - is then moulded into dark, compact bricks that are used as outdoor pavers for walkways and garages.
“They’re twice as strong as concrete,” boasts co-founder Khaled Raafat, 24, slamming one onto the floor for emphasis.
Each tile takes about “125 plastic bags out of the environment,” says his business partner Amr Shalan, 26, raising his voice above the din of the machines.
Raafat said the company uses even low-grade plastics and products “made of many different layers of plastic and aluminium that are nearly impossible to separate and recycle sustainably.”
Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, is also the biggest plastic polluter in the Middle East and Africa, according to a multinational study reported by Science magazine.
The country generates more than three million tonnes of plastic waste per year, much of which piles up in streets and illegal landfills or finds its way into the Nile and the Mediterranean Sea.
Microplastics in the water concentrate in marine life, threatening the health of people who consume seafood and fish caught in Africa’s mighty waterway - mirroring what has become a worldwide environmental scourge. Tilegreen, launched in 2021, aims to “recycle three billion to five billion plastic bags by 2025”, said Shalan.
The start-up last year started selling its outdoor tiles, of which it has produced some 40,000 so far, and plans to expand into other products usually made from cement.
Egypt, a country of 104 million, has pledged to more than halve its annual consumption of single-use plastics by 2030 and to build multiple new waste management plants.
For now, however, more than two thirds of of Egypt’ s waste is“in adequately managed ,” according to the World Bank - driving an ecological hazard environmental groups have been trying to tackle.
On the shores of the Nile island of Qursaya, some fishermen now collect and sort plastic trash they net from the river as part of an initiative by the group Verynile.