From hawking to building a fortune in trash

Francis Muriithi started his entrepreneurial journey as a hawker in Karatina town, Nyeri County.

Today, he runs a business that’s the envy of many in the recycling and salvage business.

Back in 2008, like many other young people, he joined a group in the hope of getting financing that would give him something new to do away from hawking.

“A number of us came together and formed a group to clean up the town and collect garbage for a small fee. However, we didn’t make much money, so most of the group members eventually left,” Francis says. But in the process of collecting garbage, he’d developed a passion for the environment and didn’t want to give up his participation in cleaning it up.

Still, it needed to make business sense. “I’d noticed that people would scavenge through dumpsites looking for metal, which they would then deliver to scrap yards in Karatina. I got interested in doing something similar, so I did some research to find out what this business was all about,” he says.

The idea

Excited about the opportunity to make extra cash, he started sorting the waste he was collecting.

“Initially, I used to deliver scrap metal to dealers, but as I’d go through the garbage, the majority of items I’d come across were plastics and glass. Since there was little competition for these items, I decided to concentrate on collecting them. I leased a small piece of land to set up my own salvage yard and started buying plastics and glass from other garbage collectors.”

When he had gotten a small stockpile, Francis travelled to Nairobi to find a market for the items he had.

His thinking was that if there were people willing to buy scrap metal, there must be those who’d buy items like plastic, bones and broken glass.

And he was right. He identified 10 industries that recycle these products and were willing to buy the items in bulk.

The pricing

He got back to Karatina with good reason to grow his stockpile, so he spread the word about what his business, Vicmax Scrap Dealers, was doing.

Eventually, Francis found himself collecting hundreds of kilos of plastic, glass and bone a week, and with time, this climbed to thousands of kilos.

Now, he sells these sorted items by the lorryful. One lorry can carry 11 tonnes of glass, which he sells at Sh5,000 per tonne. When it comes to plastic, one load of 1.5 tonnes will fetch him Sh7,000 per tonne, while a tonne of bones will earn him Sh12,000, with a lorry being able to hold 11 tonnes.

However, the most lucrative waste item remains scrap metal, with a lorry carrying 12 tonnes of it, and fetching between Sh20,000 and Sh30,000 per tonne.

Francis, though, isn’t concentrating on scrap metal as the competition is stiff; instead, he focuses on plastic, which he believes is a largely untapped market.

Currently, he has 43 suppliers and employees relying on his business to make a living.

The rebound

But like many other businesses in Kenya, the 2017 elections complicated his business, as most of the companies he was selling the waste items to shut down or lowered their buying prices.

“I started to experience losses and realised I need to adapt and find another way to make money, so I went online and did some research on how to recycle plastic.”

Francis also travelled to Nairobi and Embu, where he visited industries that make plastic products like chairs, buckets and pegs in a bid to understand how his trash was being turned into gold.

“I realised that I could recycle plastic in my own salvage yard. All I needed was fire, sand, some chemicals and a mould of what I wanted to create.”

He then started the long process of trial and error until he was able to make ventilation blocks.

One of the things he discovered was that not all plastic was good for recycling. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is commonly used for drinking bottles, was the best option.

He lights a wood fire and melts the plastic in a large metal drum. He then adds sand and metal salts, and pours the boiling liquid into the mould. It’s left to dry for two to three days.

“I can make up to 500 ventilation blocks a week, which I then distribute to local hardware shops,” Francis says.

The market

However, it wasn’t easy convincing hardware shops to stock his blocks, which were competing with concrete blocks that have been in the market for years.

“At first, nobody trusted my blocks. However, it soon emerged that my invention was more durable that the traditional cement blocks and now almost every hardware stocks my plastic blocks.”

Among the reasons the plastic recycled blocks have found a following is that they don’t crack or flake off.

Further, Francis sells his plastic blocks cheaper at Sh30 a piece against the Sh50 for a concrete block.

But his foray into value addition hasn’t been without its challenges, top on the list being the high cost of moulds.

“Getting the mould for an everyday object like a chair or a bucket is very expensive. A mould can cost between Sh10,000 and Sh50,000.”

On average, Francis spends Sh10,000 to buy a tonne of plastic. He can make 500 ventilation blocks from a tonne of usable plastic, selling each at Sh30 and making Sh15,000.

This is aside from the money he makes from the sale of other waste items and unusable used plastic.

“It’s a fulfilling business. I want to invest in more moulds so that I can diversify the items, and eventually set up a manufacturing company just like those in Nairobi.”

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