Waste-to-Fuel & Plastic Credit

Globally, only 9% of plastic gets recycled. In Africa, 64% of plastic is mismanaged — uncollected, dumped, or open-burned. Since 2023, The Recycler has been working on what happens to the rest: the “other plastic” no recycler will take.

First, we sort it again — looking for material that can still be recycled. Whatever genuinely cannot be is shredded and sent to a local cement kiln as waste-to-fuel, displacing fossil fuels in the kiln’s clinker-making process. This approach is accepted by both the Basel Convention and the Montreal Protocol, and is standard practice at 150+ kilns across Europe.

To be clear: recycling is still our number one priority. Waste-to-fuel has real criticism — it still replaces one fossil fuel with another, and the best path is reducing and redesigning plastic in the first place. But in Tanzania, where un-collected plastic is routinely open-burned at dumpsites, a filtered cement kiln is a meaningfully better destination than the environment.