Verified plastic recovery infrastructure — Nigeria
Green Africa builds reverse vending machines that verify a plastic bottle, pay the person who brought it in seconds, and write a permanent record of the transaction to a public ledger. We're building the layer African recycling has been missing: proof.
{"ts":"2026-08-06T14:32:11Z","machine":"GA-IBD-004","material":"PET-CLEAR","weight_g":24,"status":"verified"}1st place
Overall winner, 2025 Hedera Africa Hackathon — 1,300+ submissions
100%
of machines fabricated in Nigeria, repairable with local parts
1 bottle = 1 record
Every verified deposit written to a public ledger, checkable by anyone
01 — The problem
Plastic already moves. Informal collectors, aggregators and recyclers shift enormous volumes every day across Nigerian cities. What almost none of it carries is a trustworthy record — who recovered it, where, when, and whether the tonnage on the invoice matches the tonnage in the yard.
That gap has a price. Brands with extended producer responsibility obligations can't substantiate what they've funded. Credit buyers can't distinguish a real tonne from a double-counted one. Funders write cheques against reports nobody can independently check. And the person who actually did the work — the one carrying a sack of bottles across town — gets paid last and least.
We started at that last point and worked backwards.
02 — What we do
01
Our machines use onboard computer vision and a load cell to confirm that what went in is an empty PET bottle — not a filled one, not a look-alike, not the same bottle twice. Verification happens inside a sealed chamber where lighting and camera position are fixed, which is why it's accurate and why it's cheap.
02
No points to redeem later. No app store queue. Airtime or mobile data lands on the recycler's phone within seconds of the bottle dropping. It's the difference between a good idea and something people use twice.
03
Each verified deposit is written to Hedera, a public distributed ledger. The record is timestamped, tamper-evident and independently checkable — by you, by an auditor, by a regulator, without asking us for permission.
03 — Who it's for
If you drink from a bottle
Bring it back, get paid.
Find a machine
If you put plastic on the market
Get recovery data you can put in a compliance filing.
For brands
If you buy or process recovered PET
Get baled, segregated feedstock with a documented chain of custody.
For partners
If you fund environmental outcomes
Get reporting that doesn't depend on trusting us.
Talk to us
04 — Proof point
Green Africa won first place overall at the 2025 Hedera Africa Hackathon — the cross-track championship, out of more than 1,300 submissions from over 13,000 developers across the continent. The prize funds the deployment now underway.
Every machine is fabricated in Nigeria. That's not a slogan about local content; it's the only way the unit economics work. An imported reverse vending machine costs more than the plastic it will ever collect. Ours doesn't.
More about usWrite to us
We'd rather have a real conversation than send you a brochure. Tell us who you are and what you need to know — offtake terms, EPR reporting, siting a machine, or how the ledger records actually work.
We reply within two working days.