Turning invasive hyacinth into eco-friendly plastic alternatives

When Joseph Nguthiru and his classmates at Egerton University took a trip to Lake Naivasha in 2021, they got trapped after their boat failed to navigate through water hyacinth. Nothing had prepared them for such a frightening experience. They would remain stuck for hours and even witness fishermen struggle to exit the lake due to the weed. 

Water hyacinth is the world's most problematic aquatic weed, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. It affects a range of activities including fishing, navigation, irrigation, water treatment and the production of hydroelectric power in more than 70 countries across the world. It also acts as a mosquito breeding site.

The weed found its way into Lake Naivasha in the late 1980s and has been choking the water body and adversely affecting tourism and fishing activities.

Having witnessed first-hand the devastating impacts of the weed, Joseph, a Water and Environmental Engineering graduate, says he started thinking of a solution to eliminate the hyacinth and make it easy for fishermen and other people who depend on the lake for a livelihood.

His experience at the lake led to the conception of the idea of harvesting the weed and converting it to raw materials for manufacturing biodegradable alternatives to single-use plastics.

Joseph, 25, is the founder of HyaPak, a start-up that converts the invasive weed into products such as wrappers, plastic straws, tumblers and party plates. 

As part of their final engineering project, together with his classmates, they thought of using hyacinth to solve another bigger problem— plastic pollution — after residents discarded plastic bag seedling wrappers during a tree planting event. “We made the connection between the water hyacinth menace and single-use plastic pollution and decided to use one problem to remedy the other,’’  he says.

In 2022, he established the start-up with the idea to not only operate as a social venture with environmental benefits but also positively impact the livelihoods of the affected communities.

“There was no prior research in academic journals and online that could have guided us and we thus had to put in time and resources into research and development processes with the help of some laboratory attendants and research assistants.”

Joseph explains that local fishing communities in Lake Naivasha harvest the water hyacinth, which is then taken to their facilities at Egerton University.

“Here, the hyacinths are crushed, dried and then grounded into fine powder. We then add binders and additives through a proprietary process and mold it to form the final products," he says.

Joseph notes that so far they have eliminated close to 30 tonnes of water hyacinth from Lake Naivasha .HyaPak works in collaboration with several government agencies such as the National Commission for Science, Technology, and Innovation to create new standards for some of their products and test others.

The company, which has so far created job opportunities for about 42 people, started with food packaging consumables, but the molds for mass-producing these are a bit capital-intensive and thus they pivoted to biodegradable packaging bags and seedling wrappers.  

“We are developing a comprehensive response to the triple global crisis of pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change. In all the  three, the extent to which a solution is implemented is determined by societal shifts prompted by their actions,” he says, adding that the objective is to enable the shift to start with the fundamental consumer behaviour of selecting sustainable goods and packaging.

“We are still in the process of looking for larger machinery to mass produce as we have not yet scaled up to meet the enormous market demand,” he says.

HyaPak has also collaborated with the government for the adoption and use of HyaPak's invention through Jaza Miti, a programme for accelerating land restoration and forestry, which aims to plant 15 billion trees over the next 10 years. 

Joseph’s project of converting the invasive weeds into biodegradable plastics has gained much acclaim, with his company having been awarded the Best Innovation in Water, Food and Nature Systems at last year’s COP28 in Dubai.

Apart from his work at HyaPak, Joseph is also the inventor of a solar dryer, which is presently being utilised to bring back pyrethrum plant cultivation in Kenya.  "The solar dryer is being used across the country to revive the crop and I designed it to help farmers dry the flowers to the right conditions," he states. 

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