• Recyclable materials are one of the world’s gifts to mankind.
• One can not only control the littering of the environments; one can also solve problems and make money from plastic waste.
• An African brand has taken up the task of not just ridding the streets of plastic waste but also making tough thick tiles from the waste materials.

Rising levels of discharged pollutants from the building sector as well as loads of waste entering the Mediterranean Sea are some of the problems that a budding Egyptian company is working on as it aims to convert over five billion plastic bags into tough building tiles. It says the tiles are designed to be tougher than cement.

The co-founder of Tile Green, the Africa-based brand that has embarked on this significant journey, Khaled Raafat, told Journalists that “so far, we have recycled more than five million plastic bags, but this is just the beginning, we aim that by 2025, we will have recycled more than 5 billion plastic bags.”

At the outskirts of Cairo, where the company’s factory is sited, workers are sighted carrying bulky barrels loaded with different plastic wastes to be heated into liquefication then, subsequently, compressed. What comes forth are solid tiles, assembled, packaged and sold to real estate developers and companies positioned as contractors for use in outdoor paving.

Considering, and consolidating on, efforts being made by Egyptian authorities to alleviate the spread of improper refuse disposal, as well as monitor Egypt’s place in the pollution of the Mediterranean region, the company has kept an eye on the 74,000 tones of plastic waste that find their way into the sea every year. This, according to a 2020 report by a non-profit organization, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, ensures that Egypt’s ranking improves on the list of nature-friendly nations.

With this development, plastic wastes headed for the streets, to be disposed of in unapproved dumps, or to be burnt unceremoniously in a health-compromising way are converted into valuable materials used in the making of hard building tiles. Recall that the North African country of Egypt hosted the United Nations COP27 climate summit in November last year, and it has, ever since, sustained efforts in maintaining environment-friendly policies including banning the use of single-use plastics in several provinces of the country in recent years.

The country’s Environment Minister, Yasmine Fouad, while speaking with journalists at COP27, said the government was working with superstores and hypermarkets to end single-use plastics by the middle of the year 2023 and was targeting to place a nationwide ban on them by 2024.

Although some of these measures being put in place to convert waste materials into usable quality products are still not the strongest of steps yet but concerted efforts from all stake holders may help scale up the scientific, environment-friendly, yet large-scale disposal of waste.

The products from the plastics are expected to undergo tests for flammability, mechanical strength, and water absorption so as to conform with existing global standards. When the thick tiles emerge from all tests and processes that it has been subjected to, a solid building material will be introduced to support similar products in the global building market. Seeing that the products are made from plastic, they can be customized as well.

According to experts, apart from tile making or building, plastic waste materials can also be used in road constructions, paper making, and other areas. There is an urgent need to solidify the development and use of recycled or retreated waste by looking at the inherent potential of different kinds of waste materials.