All Women Recycling - South Africa

All Women Recycling is helping to save the planet one plastic bottle at a time and empowering women with business, life skills and craft skills. By reusing polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles destined for overflowing landfills in South Africa, this activity is training women to create new products from recyclables and is creating local and global awareness about the need to reuse and recycle.

Fast facts:

This activity has provided 13 full-time jobs for women from urban townships;
This activity has reached over nine countries and has produced 3,000 kliketyklikbox™ units per week, saving over 12,000 PET bottles per month from community streets and landfills;
This roughly equals 219 kilograms of CO2 avoided each month and 2,628 kilograms of CO2 avoided per year.

The problem

The landfills in Cape Town, South Africa are filled to capacity. Many women in the area are living in impoverished homes and are mostly single mothers with low educational backgrounds. They need a safe place to grow and learn new talents that can benefit and improve their lives.

The solution

This activity buys PET bottles from dumps and collects them from street collectors around Cape Town, reducing community waste and saving them from reaching landfills thus preventing greenhouse gas emissions. The bottles are repurposed into either a decorative kliketyklikbox™ or another craft product to sell, benefitting women and the planet. All Women Recycling employs team leaders who manage their teams and teach trainees to get orders out on time, meet deadlines, arrive on time, work as a group, and help build confidence.

Helping the planet

By upcycling plastic bottles destined for a landfill, this activity is keeping their community clean, preventing greenhouse gas emissions and raising awareness about the importance of recycling.

Helping people

All Women Recycling supports women from townships around Cape Town, mostly single mothers. This activity aims to transform their lives and those of their children.

Scaling up

The more sales the activity can make and the more client relationships they can build, the more women they can employ. The All Women Recycling activity has grown a lot since 2009. Today, they employ 13 women and receive re-orders for recycled bottle products from local and international markets. Thus, the activity is able to increase their usage of PET bottles, which in turn takes more bottles off the street and out of the landfills. This activity is aiming to reach markets in the United States of America, Italy, Greece and Turkey.