U-recycle Initiative Africa

U-recycle Initiative Africa combats plastic pollution and promotes environmental sustainability through capacity building.

Founded in 2018 by One Young World Ambassador Oluwaseyi Jesuton, U-recycle Initiative Africa educates and equips young people with skills to tackle plastic pollution and climate change through outreach programmes, professional fellowships, bootcamps, and school campaigns.

Oluwaseyi attended the Summit in Belfast. As a reserve Delegate Speaker, Oluwaseyi wrote and delivered a speech that was recorded and uploaded onto the One Young World YouTube channel. This amplified her work and profile.

Since 2018, U-recycle Initiative Africa has implemented over 75 projects in 11 African countries and provided 10,000 youth with the knowledge and tools to tackle environmental issues in their schools and communities.

Flagship programmes include The African-Youth-for-Environment Fellowship (AY4E), involving 5,000 young people, and the PlasticWize Fellowship. The latter gave 30 female university students the resources needed to implement innovative solutions to reduce single-use plastics on campuses. One innovation is the ‘talking’ bin with a mouth that eats waste, comical eyes and speech bubbles to encourage recycling habits and awareness of plastic pollution. 25 talking bins are now found across four universities in Nigeria with 244,598 plastic bottles collected at one university in just 10 weeks. Other strategies to foster behavioural change include the PlasticWize 21-day Challenge, an online gamified platform to train young people in environmental issues.

U-recycle Initiative Africa combines technology with research. One project analysed water, soil, sediment, and fish in an Indigenous coastal community to demonstrate the damage and health risks associated with plastic pollution. Findings informed policy recommendations and demonstrated how community-rooted science can influence climate justice and reduce plastic use nationally.