Lorna Rutto left banking to turn Nairobi’s plastic waste into fence posts
Raised in a Nakuru informal settlement, Lorna Rutto founded EcoPost to recycle plastic into durable fencing. The company says it has diverted millions of kilograms of waste and created hundreds of jobs.
Lorna Rutto grew up in Kaptembwa, an informal settlement in Nakuru, Kenya, where overflowing sewers and rubbish in the streets were part of daily life. She studied accounting at Africa Nazarene University and took a job at Imperial Bank, one of the country’s larger lenders. She has said the work felt disconnected from what she cared about.
So she left, and started a company to solve the problem she had grown up around.
A product made from the problem
EcoPost, founded around 2009 with co-founder Charles Kalama, collects plastic waste across Nairobi and turns it into fencing posts, a substitute for timber. Timber posts rot and require cutting trees; recycled plastic posts do not rot and cost the environment far less. Over time the range has extended to construction materials and road signage.
The numbers the company has shared are significant. Over about fifteen years, EcoPost reports recycling more than 13 million kilograms of plastic, creating over 300 direct jobs and roughly 12,000 indirect income opportunities, conserving about 4,500 acres of forest, and avoiding well over 100 million kilograms of carbon dioxide. It currently buys around 30 tonnes of waste a month. These are company-reported figures and should be read that way.
Waste pickers as suppliers
The social design is as important as the engineering. EcoPost buys plastic from collectors in marginalised communities, giving a steady income to people who often work informally and without protection. The company’s supply chain, in effect, starts in the places that live closest to the waste.
Recognition
Rutto won the Cartier Women’s Initiative sub-Saharan laureate prize in 2011, was named Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year for Africa in 2013, and received UN Person of the Year recognition for Kenya in 2014. Forbes featured her among Africa’s youngest power women in 2012.
The story is a counterpoint to the idea that sustainability and profit are in tension. In EcoPost’s case the business depends on the problem, because without waste there would be no raw material, which gives the company every reason to keep collecting it.
