The idea came to Louisa Gathecha when she worked for a food and beverages company, a job that took her from Kenya to Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan and more. Watching how glass bottles and jars were tossed out as garbage, she spotted a huge gap–and an opportunity–in the market for recycling.
Louisa made the leap from employee to entrepreneur in 2020, just four months after investing her savings in a glass crushing business. Newly a mother, her personal priorities were shifting too. She no longer wanted to travel as much. Staying put, closer to home, was better suited to motherhood.
Her timing was fortuitous. A Kenyan government initiative, MbeleNaBiz (Forward in Business) promoted a competition for 18 to 35-year-olds to receive grant financing with the potential to run businesses that create jobs for others. She was one of 750 to win, and the $36,000 in grant funding enabled Louisa to scale up her company, Bottles Logistics EA Ltd, in a booming area of Nairobi and create jobs.
First, though, she had to adapt it to the pandemic. During COVID, most glass manufacturers shut down, causing a drop in demand for crushed glass. But, as home consumption of alcohol rose, waste management companies began collecting plenty of empty bottles. Kenyan distillers and bottlers took over from glass manufacturers to become her main clients, and they remain so, with reusable bottles now 80% of the business.
Today, in a large airy shed with a smooth concrete floor and new metal roof, dozens of women in green aprons and gumboots scrub clear glass bottles with wire wool in plastic drums of soapy water. Louisa credits the introduction of semi-automated washing stalls, equipped with green bottle brushes, in January this year, with increasing capacity of processing from 720,000 to 1.2 million bottles a month.
Away from the shed, damaged bottles, whether chipped, scratched, or broken, are manually placed on a conveyor belt to be crushed and recycled. This process allows manufacturers to melt them down, which is both cheaper and more environmentally friendly than producing new glass from scratch.
Since COVID, Bottles Logistics EA Ltd has scaled its crushed glass output from 80 to 300 tons of refined cullet per month, offering Kenya a cost-effective , environmentally friendly recycling model that cuts carbon emissions, diverts waste from landfills, and is highly replicable. To date, the company has diverted 66,400 tons of glass waste from the environment, saving an equivalent amount of virgin material such as sand from mining—and reduced carbon emissions by 11,066 tons.
Louisa’s company workforce has swelled from 60 to 140 and its revenue has tripled.
Expansion
Creating new job opportunities has been a source of satisfaction, says Gathecha, one of the “highs” of being an entrepreneur. She recently opened a new glass crushing plant with 70 employees in the Rift Valley city of Nakuru.
Many of her workers were born and raised in Kenya’s poorest urban settlements. Youth are disproportionately represented in vulnerable employment, including self-employment, unpaid family work, and informal sector jobs, which are often low-skilled and low-paying. As bottle-washers, they earn $1 per crate of 62 bottles. Their daily earning capacity of between $5.50-7.50 brings them in line with Kenya’s legal minimum for the nature of their work and its location.
Existing workers in the company can be upskilled. Tabby Njeri, a 29-year-old single mother of two, moved to quality control from a bottle washer, a role that earns her up to $40 per her six-day week. 76% of Louisa’s employees are women.
Exodus
Kenya’s job crisis is so severe that even university graduates often feel forced to leave the country to find work. After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts in Commerce and Marketing, Louisa ended up in an industry she never saw herself in. Her advice to new graduates? “Open your eyes, there are very many open doors. You must roll up your sleeves and pick whichever door is open.”
She talks about the highs and lows of being an entrepreneur. Her “highest high” was identifying a profitable export market for the colored glass, whose demand is low in Kenya. “And my lowest low was when I lost one of my significant customers,” she says. That said, the customer came back to her two years later.
Advice from technical experts through KYEOP, she says, is among the most useful support. She was unaware, for example, that the Kenya Export Promotion & Branding Agency (KEPROBA) offered exporters guidance, and that the country’s 2022 Finance Act granted new exporters 15% in tax reductions for ten years. Being a woman in a male-dominated industry “has also not been a very easy journey,” Louisa says.
Government and donor backing
MbeleNaBiz, one of four interventions under the Kenya Youth Employment Opportunities Project (KYEOP), ran from 2019 to 2023 to help high-growth entrepreneurs create jobs for fellow youth. Through one-off cash grants of $9,000 or $36,000 and business development support, the initiative backed 750 Kenyans with innovative ideas in diverse sectors such as agriculture, horticulture, apiculture, construction, recycling, animal husbandry, taxation, digital products, advertising, delivery, cosmetics, and hair products. These grants enabled start-ups and existing businesses to scale, introduce market innovations, and double their workforce—creating over 3,000 direct jobs.
KYEOP empowered 145,000 youths, with 87% gaining employment, created 30,000 indirect jobs, and boosted earnings by 50%. Building on this success, it paved the way for National Youth Opportunities Towards Advancement project (NYOTA)—a nationwide program expanding youth employment interventions to all 47 counties in Kenya.
