For as long as she can remember, Herina Onyach cringed at the sight of litter, trash, or garbage in any form.
Years later, she runs Creative Consolidated Systems Ltd, an integrated waste management company she founded 25 years ago. The comprehensive waste prevention system involves recycling, composting, and waste disposal. Her company initially dealt with car and house cleaning, gardening, landscaping, fumigation, and pest control. Now her work encompasses waste management, and she works with different private and public corporations in the country.
In 2017, she partnered with Safaricom to offer integrated waste management services. In the same year, the telco committed to reducing plastic by doing away with single-use plastic items by 2022 and has grown to achieve this goal. The Safaricom retail shop at Westside Mall Nakuru has benefitted from her services.
Phyllis Mungai, Retail Centre Manager at the shop, says that the telco has embraced the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12, which calls for sustainable consumption and production patterns. This is done to curb and reduce the climate change crisis and environmental pollution by reducing 1,029,122 kgs of carbon emissions and creating 429 direct jobs. The telco aims to be a Net-Zero organization by 2050.
The work by Phyllis and the staff at the shop is the result of the initiative at Safaricom to educate its staff on proper waste management by creating internal and external awareness campaigns as well as training that aid in sensitizing the importance of proper waste management to the environment. The telco also discourages the use of single-use plastics and has managed to eliminate 15.9 million pieces of SIM cards from its supply chain, 252,00 plastic tumblers in retail outlets, 5.1 million plastic pieces in the offices as well as 19.1 million pieces of crockery in their cafeterias.
At the retail shop, well-labelled disposal bins are strategically laid out for customers and staff. They are labelled in three categories: plastic, paper, and organic waste bins. After a day’s work, the team led by Herina collects the trash from the bins, sorts it accordingly and thereafter the waste is weighed in kilograms and packed ready for collection by various partners.
The plastic waste is taken to a private plastic collector and recycler who then shreds it and recycles it to different items such as jerricans, plates and buckets. The paper waste is taken to a recycler and the organic waste is taken to the dumpsite where most of it is collected and used by local farmers as compost.
Herina says weighing the trash is important, especially in an organisation setting because it enables them to monitor if there is progress in minimising the amount of waste being generated. If not, relevant measures are taken to ensure quality results are achieved.
According to Evelyne Serro, Sustainability Lead at Safaricom, the company is leveraging the value of partnerships by looking for organizations with the same ambitions around Net-Zero commitments and climate change. “We are working towards our 2025 strategy and one key initiative that we’re very proud of and ambitious about is planting 5 million trees by 2025. Through the Adopt a Forest approach, a collaboration with the Kenya Forest Service, we’ve planted 1.3 million trees so far. Based on our estimates, this will help us offset about 26% of carbon.”
The future cannot be any brighter for Herina and her company that started out with only five employees to now 600 across the country. “We are moving into a space that will have every individual and organisation embrace integrated waste management, because the current ongoing pollution calls for everyone to put a concerted effort towards it.
“If you look through in terms of your procurement, are there items that you could procure that are not necessary in terms of the packaging they come in? In a case where you can have your own bags, use reusable bags, use reusable tumblers and in terms of handling waste, it is very possible to take the segregation of waste to the domestic level.” she adds.
