Sargasso Reclamation hails from Malindi in Kenya, a 1400 year old city from the Swahili-Zanzibari culture. Today Malindi is a coastal Tourism destination of 200,000 people and the region of Malindi and our neighbouring towns have a role to play in the fight against ocean waste. Malindi has the size and industrial capacity to boast a recycling sector, and our region has a growing plastic footprint of its own, the estuary of a large river that flows from densely populated inland regions, and a natural coral reef ecosystem in the shallow seas off our coast. Our trade winds also mean that on some local beaches large amounts of plastic wash ashore from the Indian ocean garbage patch, with packaging from Malaysia, Mozambique or Dubai.
Our team come from a mix of backgrounds: local advocacy, local businesses and European environmental NGOs. We have been operating for 2 years in Malindi; Engaging with local communities, Building a recycling capacity, and getting to understand the ecological and social context of the region. With established sales in local recycling networks and experience in source differentiation, auditing and certification, we are bringing our product to ocean plastic markets on the world stage in 2023.
A key weakness of the fast-growing recycling sector in Africa is low margins mean bad deals for investors and workers that stifle development for an ecologically foundational sector that has benefits across the biosphere. By leverage ocean plastic markets and in time other sources of added value, we are creating a healthier recycling sector for Africa that can fully leverage market mechanisms to solve the crisis.
To create a healthy, price competitive recycling sector in East Africa, using international innovations to boost sales prices for recycled plastics in the market. To then leverage this position to strengthen the sectors stability by sharing our windfall across stakeholders, fostering firm financial foundations, lifestyle stability at pride of work across the value chain, thereby insuring that ecological regeneration is not reliant on global commodity prices.