[Pine Kazi founders and farm workers uprooting waste pineapple suckers]
James Kinuthia (interview): “I am a pineapple farmer. I started farming a long time ago. In the past we would burn or throw away or replant pineapple suckers. Later on we met with this company called Pine Kazi. We sell one sucker to them at 15 Kenya shillings each (0.094 $US).”
[Pine Kazi founders and women from KEE Enterprises Development centre sorting pineapple leaves]
[Woman turning on a decorticator machine]
[Decorticator machine]
[Pine Kazi founders and women from KEE Enterprises Development centre processing pineapple leaves to fiber]
[Pineapple leaf fiber]
[Pine Kazi founders and women from KEE Enterprises Development centre processing pineapple leaves to fiber]
[Olivia Awuor, CEO and Co – founder of Pine Kazi]
Olivia Awuor (interview): “Pine Kazi is a new and innovative social business venture that recycles waste pineapple leaves into a biodegradable textile that is friendly to the environment and we use these textiles to make eco-friendly fashion products like shoes and bags, while creating meaningful and sustainable employment to vulnerable groups in the community.”
[Pineapple leaf fiber being washed]
[Fiber being sun dried]
[Pine Kazi founders holding dried fibers]
[Women making threads from the material using their legs]
Olivia Awuor (interview): “Annually about 766 million tons of post-harvest pineapple leaves are usually produced and they are burnt or chemically decomposed. So by collecting this waste, for every 1000 tonnes of waste we collect, we reduce carbon and methane emissions by 0.28 metric tonnes and with our solution we hope to scale to other countries that produce pineapple waste as well, so that we can be able to solve this problem at a global scale.”
[Cobbler making shoe from pineapple leaf textile]
[Cobbler using hammer]
[Cobbler working]
[Betterman Simidi, founder of public sanitation advocacy organisation, Clean Up Kenya]
Betterman Simidi (interview): “Kenya has a problem with fast fashion. We are seeing increasingly that a lot of this clothing is coming into the country, especially as second-hand clothing. In the last five years, for example, we have seen over a million kilograms of clothing being imported into the country. And so when we see innovations that are coming up, where they are using sustainable materials like for example we have heard of groups that are using pineapple, pineapple waste, in order to be able to make fibres that can be used to make clothing. These innovations are important and, you know, we need to encourage them.”
[Eco-friendly shoes made from pineapple leaf textile]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.