Waste plastic is not recycled in Cape Verde but either left in the environment, in streets and on beaches, or collected and burnt in garbage dumps. This is bad for the environment, but also for the health of people. Cape Green Foundation intends to start a plastic recycling program that involves the local population, especially young people. The project will start in 2025 in cooperation with the city council of Tarrafal. Learn more in this video below.

We intend to buy a portable plastic shredding machine (see photo). It shreds and melts waste plastics like bottles, bags and more; the end product of the process is plastic wire on a spool.

We also intend to buy the complement to this shredder, the extruder, a machine (of the same size) with various moulds that melts the plastic wire and produces a variety of objects in different colours made out of the waste plastic. These can be household objects like plates, cups and buckets but also objects that are suitable for selling to tourists. Colourful bracelets, pendants, small animals and so on. We will invite young people to collect waste plastic and pay them. This is an incentive to clean the environment.

In November 2024 two team members, technical expert Aren Slootweg and Ton van der Lee, went on an investigative mission to see what the needs and possibilities are. They investigated where the waste plastic is and in what quantity and what the possibilities are for collecting plastic bottles and glasses from restaurants and bars.

They also found out what products are popular among tourists and what products are needed by the local population, like for instance, chairs and stools. They found that there is a lot of interest from local shops is to resell these products; there are a number of small tourist shops and quite a few shops that sell household items to the local population. The idea is to sell our products to the shops at low price or give them in consignation for them to sell, after which they will pay us our basic price back. This will enable us to set up a business model.

We have already tested and designed a number of products, like these turtle keyrings, chairs, toys, bags and wallets.

We also have a part of the project which is low tech; this concerns the making of tote bags, beach bags and shopping bags from recycled plastic for which only a clothes iron and a sewing machine are needed. We have already found a seamstress willing to work with us.

On our first mission, we concluded that there is a lot of interest among tourists in such products.

We will work togeter with the ‘Mulheres Batalhadores’, a women’s activist group, see picture above.

You can read a piece about product labels on our blog