Kevin explaining our glass crushing process to Mr. Soufianne of AEA Award

Part of our proposal to Via Water was to recycle glass waste. This is one waste item that not many companies have focused to recycle and a few that do only make colourful jewelly or crockery. You can then imagine that they will most probably only recycle a little amount as the input required is not much.

Trace took on this challenge and as a result crafted ideas of using glass sand in bulk. We initially made our first roofing tiles using crushed glass sand and plastics. At the back of our minds knowing our products would really require lots of glass waste as inputs and as a result, we could divert a lot of glass waste from mainstream municipal waste. We later realized using glass sand for our tiles would make the products costly and away from reach for many housing consumers. Our solution to this; we separated the two waste items so that we made our roofing tiles with recycled plastics and normal sand while using the glass sand to make various building blocks such as paving blocks and hollow blocks. This is what we currently call Eco Blocks and Tiles. The concept remaining the same, using various discarded post-consumer waste materials such as plastics and glass and using them to produce different building products.

Running an enterprise is full of many challenges and it is critical to be flexible and quick to trying out different ideas so as to solve these unexpected realities. Remaining rigid only results to depression when things you had set out to do, do not eventually work as planned. However the results are worth the pain and struggles. We are continuously learning everyday and on the look out to many more challenges in the future however keeping our eyes on the prize!