Enterprise

Ex-soldier taps plastic to light up poor households

ngatia

Mr Mwangi Ngatia displays oil extracted from waste plastic using a locally made reactor in Nyeri town. Photo/Joseph Kanyi

Mwangi Ngatia has come up with an idea of producing liquid fuel from waste plastics, targeting the poor people who have been hurt by the increasing prices of fuel. A resident of Nyeri town, his immediate focus is the slums.

Mr Ngatia, 52, says that there more than 10,000 people living in the three slums of Nyeri and 98 per cent of them cannot afford to buy paraffin for cooking at their homes.

Instead, he says they use firewood for cooking and candles to light at night.

“There has to be someone to save these people and after thinking about it, I decided to produce fuel from waste plastics, polythene papers, sacks and weaves which in turn I will sell at a lower price to them,” says the father of four while at his workshop in Witemere slums.

Other slums in Nyeri that Mr Ngatia is targeting are Majengo and Kiawara.

In the last two years, Mr Ngatia has come up with a jua kali plastic reactor that he says cost him Sh80,000.

The gadget produces fuel through the process of pyrolysis, a thermochemical decomposition of organic material at raised temperatures in the absence of oxygen.
The process involves the simultaneous change of chemical composition and physical phase, and is irreversible.

Through anhydrous pyrolysis, Mr Ngatia has started producing liquid fuel similar to diesel from plastic waste with a higher cetane value and lower sulphur content than traditional diesel.

Using pyrolysis to extract fuel from end-of-life plastic, Mr Ngatia says, is a second-best option after recycling, is environmentally preferable to landfill and can help reduce dependency on foreign fossil fuels and geo-extraction.

Apart from helping the poor households, Mr Ngatia says that he will also help in cleaning up Nyeri town and it environs by recycling waste plastics and weaves.

“I’ll be part of that team that wants Nyeri County to regain its lost glory of being one of the cleanest town in the country as well as conserve the environment,” he notes.

Mr Ngatia says he mixes all kind of plastic apart from “pet”—that which is used to manufacture water bottles. At the same time, he says the oil can be used to run engines.

To find out if his oil was suitable for running engines, he says he was forced to buy an old Peugeot at Sh230,000.

With the car, he found out that the oil could run engines efficiently more so boilers in industries like those for tea without purifying.

To produce a litre of this oil, he says one needs a kilogramme of waste plastic. Currently, Mr Ngatia is modernising his reactor and wants it to produce 20 litres in every two hours.

However, the former KDF soldier says his main aim is to come up with a machine that will produce 2,000 per hour. “This will enable me meet the supply of this oil which has attracted a lot of buyers including those from without the slums,” he says.

Mr Ngatia buys plastic from people who supply to him at Sh10 per kilo.

He says he can use all the waste plastics in the county if his dream of coming up with a bigger machine comes true.

However, funding is a big challenge as he says to purchase a smaller reactor that only produces oil for a few households will cost him Sh1million.

“This is the main reason why I decided to assemble my own modernised reactor and with only Sh500,000, I can make a good reactor for this capacity,” he says.

Mr Ngatia says that already he has found a better market for his product with the buyer offering him Sh100 for every litre. However, he says his aim is not to sell to such “big” people but to those who cannot afford a litre of paraffin.

He sells the product at Sh70 but says he will lower the prices to Sh50 to make it more affordable to many when he manages to get the bigger reactor. In two months time, he hopes he will start producing the much he has been targeting.

He says his machine will also create jobs for plastic waste collectors.

“I just wish the county government will support me in this project that is usually expensive during the initial stages,” he notes.

From his pyrolysis process, he is able to get wax as the by-product. From the wax, Mr Ngatia manufactures candles which he says produces sufficient light and do not emit much soot.

If one conducts fractional distillation, he says one will get 10 per cent pure petrol, kerosene, diesel and wax.

The determined Mr Ngatia initially concentrated much on making briquettes but from his wide knowledge that he acquired from reading books, he has been able to come up with this new idea of recycling waste plastics into oil.