Greening Plastic or ... you name it!
Hello everybody! We are a consortium-to-be composed by Deltares (research institute, The Netherlands), LVIA (NGO, Italy with country offices) and Ultraplast (Senegal). After several consultations and discussions, we came to the conclusion that it is about time to present you with our project idea! With the proposed activities, we aim to tackle different pressing needs, and we have a great vision behind it. Yet, to make a long story short, here you find a (very) short description of our concept:
Dakar, similarly to other large African urban settlements, is increasingly faced with loads of plastic waste left on roadsides, drainage channels and small urban water bodies. This plastic not only creates a soil and water contamination problem, but equally represents a risk factor in terms of urban flooding. At the same time, citizens in urban and peri-urban Africa are also experiencing an increasing interest in urban gardening to either generate income from cash crops or to increase their self-sufficiency in terms of agricultural products. Moreover, urban citizens are often faced with the challenge of intermittent energy supply, especially at the household level.
In this context, our idea is to strengthen the water-food-energy nexus by acting on the following lines of thought:
Actions: we collected plastic from the streets, we clean it, sort it and process it, we turn it into new products (biodigestors, water tanks, drip irrigation systems and gardening tables) , we sell the products, we provide services on how to best make use of these products, we monitor (and trace back) the quality of water and soils before and after plastic collection, we assess agricultural productivity and energy production among our clients, and finally, we promote this business model for expansion in new cities and countries.
Expected results: cleaner and safer cities, increased water use efficiency, higher income from agricultural production, sensibilization on small-scale large-impact actions, development of a reliable monitoring tool for soil and water quality
End of a long story (fairly) short. Comments are definitely welcomed. (PS: I had to select one random country out of the list)