From bottle to bale, with a receipt at every step.

A recycler walks up to a Green Africa station. It looks like an ATM: an enclosed steel cabinet, weather-sealed, no exposed bin, no smell, nothing to vandalise. They feed in one bottle at a time.

One at a time is deliberate. It keeps the mechanism simple enough to repair with a screwdriver, and it means every single bottle gets its own verification and its own record. Machines that swallow a whole bag give you a guess. Ours gives you a count.

Inside the chamber the bottle comes to rest in front of a fixed camera under controlled light. A small neural network running on the machine's onboard computer classifies it: is this PET, is it the right grade, is it the right shape? A load cell checks the weight — a full or part-full bottle is rejected, and so is a bottle that's been fed back in for a second payout.

The whole check takes about a second. No internet connection required.

The machine sends airtime or data to the number the recycler entered. Value lands immediately.

We pay in airtime and data rather than cash for three reasons: it removes cash from a street-level machine, which removes the reason to attack it; it reaches people without bank accounts; and it's spendable the moment it arrives.

The verified deposit is signed on the device and queued locally. When the machine has connectivity, the record is submitted to Hedera's consensus network. Because records are hash-chained on the device before they're sent, a gap in the network can't be used to quietly insert, alter or delete a deposit after the fact.

What ends up on the ledger: a timestamp, a machine identifier, a material classification and a weight. What doesn't: anyone's personal details.

Machines are light-crush units at the edge — they compact bottles on the spot, because loose PET is mostly air and moving air by road is where collection margins die. Filled units are emptied on a route and consolidated at a central bale hub, where material is graded, baled and prepared for offtake.

Every bale carries back to the deposits that made it. Machine-level records roll up to route level, route to hub, hub to shipment. When a tonne leaves the hub, the ledger can account for where it came from.

That reconciliation is the product. The plastic is just what it's made of.