Our Story — GreenDesk Africa
I have
never seen
trash.
The founding story. A designer who grew up beside East Africa’s largest landfill — and what he built from it.
Our Story — GreenDesk Africa
The founding story. A designer who grew up beside East Africa’s largest landfill — and what he built from it.
I grew up in Dandora — on the edge of Nairobi, beside the largest landfill in East Africa. Plastic was not a policy problem for me. It was my landscape. My playground. The ground beneath my feet every morning on the way to school.
When I looked at a pile of discarded bottles, I did not see garbage. I saw material. When I walked past mountains of plastic, I did not feel despair. I felt something closer to curiosity: what could that become? What is it, before someone decided to throw it away?
I did not know that then. I only knew that I could not walk past a discarded thing without wondering what it still had left to give.
I was five or six the first time I made a toy car from a milk carton. I pressed the sides into shape. I found four bottle caps — mismatched, different colours — and pressed them on as wheels. I found a stick for the axle. I pushed it across the ground.
It rolled.
I was not thinking about the environment. I was not making a statement about waste. I was thinking one thing: will the wheels hold? They held. And that was enough.
I made dozens of them. Vans, trucks, buses — whatever the material suggested. The landfill was not my problem. It was my workshop. The difference between those two things is simply how you look at it.
I became a designer. Over a decade I worked across some of East Africa’s most complex design challenges — from clean energy distribution at KOKO, to youth health research at YLabs, informal retail at Kyosk, and Kenya’s flagship government digital services platform eCitizen.
Each project deepened the same conviction: the best design does not impose solutions. It listens carefully to the problem, then asks what the problem itself is trying to tell you.
Dandora had been telling me something for thirty years. I finally had the tools to answer.
I looked at two problems that everyone was treating as separate: the plastic crisis at Dandora, and the 100 million school desks that East Africa needs — almost all of which will be cut from forests.
I looked at them the same way I looked at a milk carton when I was six. What if these are the same problem? What if the material for the desk is already here, already thrown away, already waiting?
GreenDesk Africa is a milk carton van, thirty years later. The same instinct. The same refusal to see the end of the story in a discarded thing. The same question: