Turning plastic waste into building blocks

Jul 24, 2023

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Kubik is proud of its pioneering, climate-friendly technology that recycles one of the world’s environmental curses—plastic waste—into construction blocks.

But for the award-winning Ethiopian start-up to achieve lift-off, it has not been an easy task.

It has had to fight tooth and nail to raise funds, says its youthful boss.

Kubik takes in bundles of discarded plastic and sorts them into piles. Selected plastics are mixed, melted, and combined with additives, then molded into the desired shape.

The result: Black beams and interlocking blocks, which today are being assembled in a pilot project—the building of a daycare centre in the capital Addis Ababa.

The site has no cranes or cement mixers, just a concrete floor on which four workers make a wall by fitting the blocks together, like Lego, tapping them with a mallet to ensure a good fit.

Workers at the construction site of Kubik’s first daycare building site in Addis Ababa

There’s no glue or cement. The beams bolted together on all four sides of the walls, hold the structure up.

“The idea is for it to be super simple,” overseer Hayat Hassen Bedane, a 34-year-old structural engineer, said.

“You have a manual, and the whole point is to get it done with inexperienced workers, obviously under supervision. “You can build 50 square metres (540 square feet) of a building in just five days. So, that is super-fast compared to other forms of construction,” she said.

“We have done tests, tension-stress tests, and compressive tests, so it’s durable and strong.” Speed and the smart use of unwanted plastic aren’t the only benefits. Recycling generates just a fifth of the carbon from cement making. If Kubik’s plant processes 45 tonnes of ditched plastic each day, that’s 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) averted each year, the company said.

A worker sorts through plastic waste at Kubik’s construction warehouse building

There is a trickle-down social, too, boosting the country’s many informal waste pickers, many of whom are women.

Funding challenge

However, Kubik’s chief executive officer, Kidus Asfaw, 36, said he battled to get seed money for his company. He received a lot of knockbacks from wary investors, he said, before catching a break.

He has just completed a round of funding for several million dollars to scale up production — a success that coincided with the prestigious Africa-Tech award for the company, which boosted visibility.

The Ethiopian previously worked for Google, World Bank, and UNICEF after studying in the US. He then took the plunge to become an entrepreneur, he said.

“There is a really large network that I already had within my professional sphere that I could tap into in the beginning,” he told AFP last month in Paris, where he went to pick up the award.

Even so, “having that did not make it any easier” to raise funds. “I have met over 600 people in two years. Out of those 600 people, about 20 of them have become investors.” Start-ups in Africa face myriad

hurdles, from laws and regulations and lack of infrastructure to a fragmented continental market. But funding, in a continent that lacks intrepid individual investors to provide support, is a persistent and major headache.

Ethiopian start-up Kubik is proud of its pioneering, climate-friendly technology that recycles mountains of plastic waste into concrete

“There are very few ‘business angels’ in Africa,” Sergio Pimenta, the vice president for Africa at the Societe Financiere Internationale (SFI), a private-sector unit of the World Bank that has just launched a $180m fund to help provide a financing source, said.

Out of $415b in risk capital deployed around the world, just over 1% — $5.4b goes to Africa, he said. And of this sum, 80% goes to just four countries: South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Egypt.

BIAS Henry Mascot, the chief executive officer and founder of Nigerian insurance startup Curacel, a fellow winner of the AfricaTech award, said he floundered when he first tried to raise capital a few years ago.

Africa’s problem, he said, was that Western investors had a “bias” against the unknown. They invest in familiarity. They invest in the guy whom they play golf with or the guy whom they have a drink with every month.

“So, how do I become that guy? Unless a lot of these investors are starting to spend time on the continent, it will be difficult. It’s just about familiarity, Africa needs to be demystified, because right now it’s a mystery.” Fabrice Aime Takoumbo, a Cameroonian entrepreneur, who co-founded Cinaf, a streaming platform with only African content, said that non-African investors were often deterred by tales of fraud or corruption.

Without timely funding, many African start-ups withered, he warned. “You start with great ideas... (which) fall away as time passes and you realise that you don’t have the means,” he said.

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