Learners are bent over their exercise books, painstakingly tracing letters across the seemingly blank and half-filled pages. Amidst dozens of wooden desks in an overcrowded classroom with hardly any space to put a foot, a unique, sturdy desk is conspicuous in the front row. Upon request, the pupils pause writing for a second and lift their books for a clear camera view.
To most visitors, it is just another desk.
But months ago, it was a heap of discarded plastic bags and bottles clogging drainage channels not only in Kibra, but also in the outskirts and hundreds of kilometres away. Clogging disrupts water flow during heavy rains, resulting in killer floods.
Today, that same waste has become part of an innovation that is transforming classrooms, cleaning communities, combating deforestation by offering an alternative to wooden desks, and offering a lifeline to schools struggling with chronic furniture shortages, like Olympic Primary, a public registered school with a population ranging from 5500 to 6000.
Here, classes are usually packed with a single desk that should accommodate at most three pupils, squeezing five. Some of them, like this boy, are forced to sit on the floor to quench their thirst for education.
“Tunataka viti!”, a Swahili translation for ‘We Want More Seats!’, a shrilling synchronous murmur from pupils penetrates our ears as we walk through the narrow aisle left between the desks that have occupied almost the entire floor space to accommodate the swollen pupil population.
“Bring us more desks, learners are struggling here. As you can see, some are writing on the floor while others are sitting on damaged desks,” says an anonymous teacher, as she marks the class assignment.
Broken wooden desks are evident not only in classes. It is already afternoon, and as the sun beats down on the dusty playground, boys in the corridors have assumed gendered roles, repairing broken desks. This way, they escape writing on the floor on the following school day.
“You see!” says Valentine Onditi, Program Coordinator, Jirani Recyclers, as he points at the broken wooden desk lying in the school corridors. “A tree has been cut, desk wasted. This is one of the reasons why we are introducing plastic desks, because apart from saving the environment, their durability is unquestionable,” reiterates Valentine.
“I schooled here from class 1 to 8, and we could sit even 5 people on a desk, which is way above the required number. Courtesy of our project, we took 15 plastic desks there, and the positive reception motivated us to produce some more,” says Angilla Onyango, Founder of Jirani Recyclers, as he reiterates on the benefits of plastic desks.
“The good thing with plastic desks is that they don’t break easily, as is the case with wooden desks and even if they break, we take them through the same process and get another desk, and that is the good thing with recycling,” says Angilla.
Innovators’ Journey
The journey of the desk begins in a tiny workshop in Kibra, opposite Makina market. Here, youthful innovators spend their days collecting plastic waste that many residents consider worthless. For them, the mission is personal. Being Olympic School Alumni and having experienced firsthand the difficulty of studying without proper furniture, the end of their primary studies marked the beginning of a vision of creating an enabling learning environment for all their juniors.
“We are tired of seeing plastics everywhere,” says Angilla, as we start our conversation at a dumpsite in Kibra, piled with disposed plastic packs, some of them reputable brands and worn-out clothes.
With their immediate mission being to meet the rising furniture demand in schools, their ultimate goal is to completely replace wooden furniture with plastics in their bid to achieve a green environment in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
We spend three hours traversing the busy streets of Kibra together with Angilla, clad in a blue overall, at the back, printed “Jirani Recyclers”, Valentine in his black t-shirt and black trousers, and a friend in a white jacket, now holding my tripod stand. Scenes of waste are evident along feeder roads, some blocking even the deeply excavated sewers, a sign of how massively the surroundings are littered.
According to UNEP 2025, every day, the equivalent of 2,000 garbage trucks full of plastic are dumped into the world’s oceans, rivers, and lakes, while 19 – 23 million tonnes of plastic waste leak into the aquatic ecosystem, polluting lakes, rivers and seas. The impact of such extensive pollution is equally felt on the land.
Amidst all these, the innovators saw an opportunity hidden in the crisis.
“We looked at the heaps of plastic waste around us and realised we were literally sitting on a solution,” Angilla remarks amidst our casual conversation as we leave the dumpsite for the workshop. “Instead of allowing the plastic to pollute rivers and the environment, we could convert it into something valuable for children,” he reiterates
The sight of a plastic desk, stool, dustbin and a bench welcomes us at the workshop. Inside the tiny room, a rattling sound emanates. As we walk in, a rusty flat machine lies on the floor. Unnoticeable smoke is billowing from the sides, and extreme heat is felt on the skin in proximity.
The process begins with collecting plastic waste from dumpsites. The plastic is sorted, cleaned, shredded, and piled between the heavy-metal heat presses. On the two ends of the heat press that are making contact, thin, flat and slippery iron sheets are attached to avoid heated plastic sticking.
“We have two heat presses,” says Narkiso Onyango, one of the innovators, as he demonstrates how the machine operates. “The top and bottom metallic heat presses are electrically heated at high temperature, and in the middle, the collected plastic bags, now shredded, are filled,” says Narkiso.
“After a complete burn, which takes a whole 1 hour, the melted and mixed plastic is withdrawn from the heat press to a cold press, and thereafter, a hardened plastic board is achieved,” says Narkiso as he tosses a board while Valentine, with the aid of a machete, cuts the rugged edges of another board on the side.
It is a laborious process. Veins on the arms and sweat rolling down the face, Narkiso is lifting humongous stonebricks that are placed on the cold press to achieve the flattened plastic boards upon cooling.
Nothing goes to waste here.
“The cutout parts are mixed with other plastics and filled in the heat press to be subjected to a similar process again,” says Narkiso.
The finished products are durable, weather-resistant, and require no timber.
Every desk produced means less plastic ending up in the environment and zero trees being cut down. It also means that some learners will have a place to sit in pursuit of knowledge.
Impact on Deforestation
Environmental experts have long warned that deforestation contributes significantly to climate change by reducing the planet’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide. By replacing traditional wooden desks with furniture made from recycled plastic, the innovators are helping preserve forests while promoting a circular economy where waste becomes a resource.
According to Global Forest Watch, from 2002 to 2025, Kenya lost 55kha of humid primary forest, making up 14% of its total tree cover loss. In 2025 alone, Kenya lost 5.5kha of natural forest, equivalent to 2.2 Mt of CO2 emissions. The trio believe that their innovation will have an impact on the government’s campaign of planting 15 billion trees by 2032, aimed at reducing greenhouse emissions.
To fast-track this, their partnership with Giraffe Centre has seen them obtain tree seedlings, which they have planted across Kibra.
“We have equally partnered with Risto za Nai movement that has given us a lot of seedlings that we have planted along Lusaka road,” says Angilla as he urges youths to be environmentally responsible.
Sustainability Walk
Armed with determination and a message about sustainability, they set out on a 500-plus kilometre walk from Nairobi to Lunga Lunga ward, Kwale County. A walk that lasted for two weeks, whose aim was to create awareness of climate change. Along the way, they visited schools and engaged communities.
“One encounter left a lasting impression,” says Valentine as he narrates heartily, a school they found at the coast where pupils learn under a tree and sit on stones. A pain that Angilla shares, as evident on his face, which has now shifted from bright to gloomy. “The children literally balanced books on their laps as they followed their teacher’s instructions,” recounts Angilla.
With a struggling voice, Angilla says, “At Kidziweni Primary School in Kwale, we found learners seated on stones under a tree, and this informed us of a dire need for desks in some schools in the country.” With a population of barely 200, Angilla noted that only one hundred plastic desks were needed to meet the demand at Kidziweni. The scene reinforced the urgency of their mission.
For the innovators, success is measured not only in profits but in lives transformed.
“When a child gets a proper place to sit and study, their confidence changes,” says Valentine as he ushers in Narkiso, who joins in his statement that “we are removing waste from the environment and impacting learning through sustainable furniture, a double victory.”
Their work directly supports several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including Quality Education (SDG 4), Responsible Consumption and Production (SDG 12), Climate Action (SDG 13), and Life on Land (SDG 15).
“Youths should not just sit when things are going badly in society. Climate action innovation is the way to go. This way, we will create responsible jobs,” says Angilla.
In their bid to improve learning, they have been met with enormous challenges. Their journey has not been easy. Limited financing, high production costs, particularly on power consumption, a slow machine that constantly breaks down, and the challenge of collecting sufficient quantities of plastic waste remain obstacles.
The fact that many schools still prefer wood over plastic furniture bothers the trio. Despite these hurdles, demand for the desks continues to grow in schools, same as the dire need to have a green environment.
“We would like the government’s support in acquiring a new machine and improved technology because, as you have noted, the surface of most of our desks is rugged,” says Narkiso as he points at a finished desk on display.
What makes their innovation remarkable is its simplicity. In a world searching for complex climate solutions, these youthful innovators are proving that some answers can be found in the waste people throw away every day.
As the climate crisis intensifies, their work offers a glimpse of what the future could look like: communities where waste is not discarded but transformed, where education and environmental protection go hand in hand, and where the desk supporting a child’s dreams is also helping protect the planet.
In classrooms, children may never know that the desk beneath their books was once a waste. But they will benefit from what it has become—a foundation for learning and a climate change pillar.
As the evening bell rings, pupils at Olympic Primary School stack their books and walk out of the classroom. The recycled desks remain behind—silent reminders that solutions to some of the biggest challenges can emerge from the most unlikely places.
