Plastic recovery infrastructure, built in Nigeria
Green Africa builds reverse vending machines that verify a plastic bottle, pay the person who brought it within seconds, and write a permanent record of the deposit to a public ledger. The record is the part of recycling in Nigeria that has been missing.
{"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, from 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
Informal collectors, aggregators and recyclers already shift enormous volumes across Nigerian cities every day. Very little of that material carries a record anyone would rely on: who recovered it, where and when, and whether the tonnage on the invoice matches the tonnage in the yard.
That gap has a price. Brands carrying extended producer responsibility obligations cannot substantiate what they have funded, and credit buyers have no way to tell a real tonne from a double-counted one. Funders write cheques against reports nobody outside the chain can check. Meanwhile the person carrying a sack of bottles across town gets the smallest share of what the material is worth.
We started at that last point and worked backwards.
02 — What we do
01
Onboard computer vision and a load cell confirm that what went in is an empty PET bottle, rather than a full one, a look-alike, or a bottle already deposited once. The check happens inside a sealed chamber with fixed lighting and a fixed camera position, which is what makes it both accurate and cheap.
02
Airtime or mobile data lands on the recycler's phone within seconds of the bottle dropping. There are no points to redeem later and no app to install first, which is most of the reason people come back a second time.
03
Each verified deposit is written to Hedera, a public distributed ledger. The record is timestamped and tamper-evident, and anyone who wants to check it can do so without asking our permission. That includes your auditor and your regulator.
03 — Where we are
Reconciled against the ledger, August 2026
6,200
Bottles collected
Verified PET deposits, each one written to the public ledger.
233 kg
CO₂ saved
CO₂e avoided versus virgin PET, at 1.5 kg per kg recovered.
₦93,000
Airtime & data paid
Paid straight to the person who brought the bottle, in seconds.
2
Devices deployed
Machines fabricated in Nigeria and running in the field today.
04 — 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
Recovery data you can put in a compliance filing.
For brands
If you buy or process recovered PET
Baled, segregated feedstock with a documented chain of custody.
For partners
If you fund environmental outcomes
Reporting that doesn't depend on trusting us.
Talk to us
05 — Proof point
Green Africa won first place overall at the 2025 Hedera Africa Hackathon, taking the cross-track championship out of more than 1,300 submissions from over 13,000 developers across the continent. The prize money funds the deployment now underway.
Every machine is fabricated in Nigeria, which is less a position on local content than a condition of the unit economics working at all. An imported reverse vending machine costs more than the plastic it will ever collect.
More about usWrite to us
Tell us who you are and what you need to know: offtake terms, EPR reporting, siting a machine, or how the ledger records work. We'll write back with an actual answer.
We reply within two working days.