- Source: Nzambi Matee
Nzambi Matee born at the date September 19 1992, is a Kenyan trained mechanical engineer, environmentalist, hardware designer, inventor and serial entrepreneur. She is well known for her innovative and creative ways of converting waste into sustainable materials. She pioneered the sustainable efforts by recycling plastic to make bricks that can be even stronger than a concrete. Her sustainable efforts have also been hailed as one of the successful strategies to curb the plastic pollution in Kenya. She founded Gjenge Makers, which is based in Nairobi, Kenya.
Career
She pursued her interest in physics and material engineering. She also worked as an engineer in the oil industry of Kenya.
In 2017, she decided to quit her job as a data analyst in order to focus on sustainability and waste management. She eventually made arrangements to set up a small laboratory in her mother’s backyard. She began creating and testing pavers, and she waited for about a year in order to develop the right ratios for her paving bricks. Furthermore, she developed the first brick from a plastic waste in 2018 and a year later in 2019 she made her own self-made machine in order to convert plastic waste to bricks in a large scale.
She also confronted few challenges as her neighbors complained about the noisy machine which she utilized for her efforts. Matee also stopped associating with her friends for a year, and it was a brief stop in her social life while she was determined to carry her mission. She won a scholarship to attend a social entrepreneurship training programme in the United States of America. During her short tour to the USA, she used the material labs in the University of Colorado Boulder to test and refine the ratios of sand to plastic.
She founded the startup company Gjenge Makers in order to recycle plastic waste into bricks. She used her own experience of design thinking when establishing the Gjenge Makers foundation. She was heavily inspired to set up Gjenge Makers after witnessing the plastic bags being untidily scattered along the streets of Nairobi. She designed her own machines at the Gjenge Makers factory and her factory has recycled around 20 tonnes of waste plastics as of 2021.
She was recognised at the United Nations Environment Programme with the prestigious honour Young Champion of the Earth 2020 Africa winner.
