A Nigerian teenager built a plastic shredder from scrap and started making bricks

Recycling plants are expensive. A shredder made from whatever you can find is not, and that is where Manasseh Aluga started.

Aluga began the Kundu Waste Management Project in March 2022 in Jos, in Nigeria’s Plateau State, when he was a teenager. He had been struck by the plastic pollution around his community. His answer was practical: build a low-cost plastic shredder from locally sourced materials, feed it discarded plastic, and compact the output into eco-friendly bricks.

The bricks are not a prototype sitting on a shelf. According to Action for Nature, which gave the project second place in the 13 to 16 age group of its 2024 International Young Eco-Hero Awards, Aluga has distributed them to local construction sites. The shredder had processed more than 800 kilograms of plastic by the time of the award.

He did not do it alone for long. Aluga recruited fellow students into what he calls the Kundu Waste Management Corps, a group that collects and recycles waste. Collection is the unglamorous bottleneck of any plastic recycling scheme, and putting classmates on it is a sensible way to solve it.

Money has been the harder problem. Action for Nature says he self-funded parts of the work by giving up his school transport and meal allowances. In 2023 he won a $100 grant from the Goodwall #GoodImpact pitch competition. That is small money, and Kundu still got a shredder out of it.

Action for Nature’s spokesperson, Kelly Carnes, said the group admired his determination “despite facing financial constraints and personal challenges,” according to Teen Trust. Aluga’s stated plans are to turn the project into a full organization and spread plastic recycling across Nigeria, and to study mechanical engineering so he can design waste technology himself.

There is no polished website for Kundu that we could find, so the award pages are the best public record. For a project built on a homemade shredder, that seems about right.