Tracking Where Donholm's Recyclable Waste Actually Goes

For over a year, our clean-up days have included a sorting step: separating plastics, glass and metal from general waste before it goes to disposal. It is extra effort on top of an already physical morning, so we wanted to know whether it was actually worth it.

We followed several sacks of sorted PET bottles and metal scrap from a recent clean-up to the small recycling buyer that operates near Umoja, who aggregates material before it moves on to larger processors in Nairobi. The sorted material earned a modest but real payment, which we have started putting back into replacing worn-out clean-up tools.

What the exercise confirmed is that sorting only works if it happens at the point of collection. Once plastics, organic waste and general refuse are mixed together in one sack, no buyer wants to touch it, and the whole batch ends up as general waste regardless of what is actually inside.

That single fact now shapes how we brief volunteers at the start of every clean-up: two extra sacks, clearly labelled, cost almost nothing in time but change what happens to the material afterward. It is a small habit with a real destination, rather than a box we tick for its own sake.

We are now looking at whether a similar arrangement could work at the household level, so that sorting does not have to wait for a clean-up day to matter.