According to the World Bank Urban Development Series report, Africa produces close to 70 million tons of plastic waste per year which is expected to increase with population.
Also a recent study showed that 90% of oceans plastic wastes are produced from Africa and Asia. For this, it is expected that by the year 2050, there is going to be more plastic wastes in the oceans than fishes.
Plastic wastes are of course problem to Africa and the world at large due to their devastating impacts on human and animals life as well as the environment.
Plastic wastesplay a role in promoting climatic changesthereby disrupting the ecosystem.
The major causes of huge amount of plastic wastes in Africa are that plastic items are used for day to day purposes due to their ease of use and low cost. Also most of the plastics are used once and then disposed.
Even though there are so many institutions tackling the plastic pollution through recycling, but one thing common to all of them is that, they are recycling the wastes into pellets for use by plastic item manufacturers. Thus, they are only reducing the use of virgin plastic pellets but the plastic waste still come back to the environment. Thus, there is need for better and more sustainable solution.
We come up with the idea of 2Roof to solve the menace of climate change posed by these plastic wastes and energy crisis in Africa.
Taking out plastic wastes that takes hundreds of years to decompose out of the environment and turning them into durable and fire resisting roofing materials will to a great extent reduce a lot of environmental challenges like rampant floods resulting from obstruction of waterways by the plastic wastes, and air pollution caused by micro-plastics. It would also reduce the amount of greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere from burning of waste plastics and those resulting from the manufacture of conventional roofing materials i.e Aluminium and Iron roofing.
As an additional part of solving climate issues 2Roof also makes buildings more energy efficient by insulation and hence reducing the need of temperature control equipment.
At stability, 2Roof will be reducing 6.7 metric tons of CO2 emission per year. This is through recycling over 1,000 tons of plastic waste yearly and clean energy generation from the solar cells.
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