Bestseller has started 2022 with a cornerstone investment in Mr. Green Africa – a pioneering recycling company based in Kenya with international aspirations.
Mr. Green Africa (MGA) has built a tech-enabled platform that manages and aggregates plastic waste and converts it into high-quality recycled plastic.
Alongside a diverse group of investors, BESTSELLER Foundation will contribute to MGA’s next stage of development, allowing the Nairobi-based company to manage plastic through the entire lifecycle and scale its business model across the African continent. This could have serious impact when it comes to cleaning up the 22 million tonnes of urban plastic waste generated across Africa every year.
MGA’s data collection means it can trace waste throughout its closed circular economy loop, which – ultimately – creates a level of transparency that is unique on a global scale.
“Mr. Green Africa is the ideal investment for us for two main reasons,” says Tine Fisker Henriksen, BESTSELLER Foundation. “One, Keiran Smith and his team are pioneering a local, transparent, closed circular economy loop, which is market-leading at an international level, and two, the company is unwavering in its efforts to create decent jobs for the thousands of waste pickers in their value chain. Local, circular, profitable, and fair – that’s perfectly aligned to our priorities.”
The Danish connection goes beyond the BESTSELLER Foundation as Mr. Green Africa has a longstanding partnership with the Danish Refugee Council and Unilever under Danida’s Market Development Partnership Programme, which aim to integrate informal and marginalised waste pickers and refugees in Kenya into a formalised plastics recycling value chain. The Fair Recycling project creates safer working conditions and increased income and decent work. To date, Mr. Green Africa has supported more than 2’500 waste pickers.
By working towards improving the output quality of its recycled plastics to a food-grade standard as well as significantly expanding production capacity to 15-20 MT p.a., Mr. Green Africa will strengthen the circular plastics economy by pioneering new business models. The company joins the Foundation’s portfolio of +10 inclusive, circular companies across Sub-Saharan Africa as the first scale-up investment since the Foundation’s investment thesis zoomed in on the circular economy early 2021.
