Thank You for Your Support

Apwoyo
Thank You
Your SUPPORT means so much to us!
SAVE THE PLANET
RECYCLE PLASTIC info@takatakaplastics.com
www.takatakaplastics.com
Call: 0393252992

Thanks to your help,
Takataka Plastics has been
growing so fast!
“There is no power for change
greater than a community
discovering what it cares about”
- MARGARET J. WHEATLEY
TRANSFORMING WASTE . EMPOWERING COMMUNITIES

HIGHLIGHTS
A FEW HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PREVIOUS MONTHS

We now have 30 full-time staff! Each employee
supports on average 5 dependents.
We purchased a second-hand pickup truck to help
us in collecting plastic waste and delivering prod-
ucts. We also use the truck for our education and
outreach campaigns in the community.

We’re building a machine shop and larger pro-
duction space at our office. The machine shop will
allow us to build and maintain our production
equipment onsite and will save us a lot of money
and time instead of relying on outside shops. We’re
also training youth in welding and fabrication skills.
The larger production space will accommodate
bigger and more production equipment.

We completed a consulting project in Kyangwali Refugee
Settlement in Western Uganda with CARE Uganda and
Lendager Group in Denmark.
We installed small-scale recycling machines in the
settlement, trained a group of the refugees in how to
operate the machines, helped perform a needs assessment
in the settlement, and developed a process to locally make
roof tiles from plastic waste that the refugees can use for
shelter in place of the tarps they’re issued. The roof tiles we
designed were showcased at Milano Design Week.
We’re iterating and improving on our locally designed and
built small-scale injection molding machine. We’ve started
selling our machines to organizations in Uganda who want
to locally recycle their own plastic waste.
https://www.careuganda.org/
https://lendager.com/

We recently launched a new product:
Mask inserts. These plastic frames sit comfortably
behind your mask and give you space to breath
and talk. They make a real difference when you
have to talk for an extended period of time. Huge
thanks to TURBOCAM for machining a precision,
polished mold pro-bono so we can make these
mask inserts!
We’re continuing to receive orders for face
shields—we recently delivered 4,000 to BidiBidi
Refugee Settlement, 5,000 to Kiryandongo Refu-
gee Settlement, and 2,500 to Lira City. We can’t
keep up with the orders for wall tiles, so we’re
working on expanding production.
https://www.turbocam.com/

Thanks to a partnership with renowned UC Berkeley
professor Ashok Gadgil, two of our student interns
have been producing Safi Safe nonalcoholic
disinfectant using an electrolysis process
developed in Dr. Gadgil’s lab. We’ve been selling Safi
Safe to businesses around Gulu and will offer it to
schools once they’re allowed to open in Uganda.
Another team of student interns is working on
recycling soap collected from hotels around Gulu
to support members of the community who cannot
afford to purchase soap for handwashing.

We’re expanding our collection of plastic waste in Gulu.
We received special permission to access Gulu’s landfill and sort
and collect plastic bottles from there. We’ve also installed large
collection bins at the Main Market, Bus Park, and other busy places
around town. We’ve recruited and trained community members
who stay near the bins to take responsibility for filling the bins with
bottles and training other people in the benefits of recycling.
During the brief couple of months when schools were open be-
tween COVID waves, we installed collection bins and conducted
outreach programs in 9 primary schools teaching students about
the dangers of burning plastic, how to recycle using the 4R’s
(Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rethink), and set up collection
competitions between the schools.

Koc Pap Pap
Humorous video teaching people how to recycle their
bottles with Takataka. Produced by Luo Comedy-
Group. Almost 10,000 views in the first month!
Mask Inserts
Humorous video showcasing our mask inserts.
Produced by Luo Comedy Group. Over 6,000 views in
just three weeks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D49X0RQCzD0
Let the Sky Breath
Music video produced by Ama Rilli (an Italian Anthro-
pology graduate student who conducted her re-
search with us for several months.) Featuring Dickens
(Gulu artist) and Blair (Our longest-employed pro-
duction team member. He formerly lived on the street
but has now turned his life around working at Takata-
ka. He loves to pursue music as his side hustle and is
an up-and-coming Gulu artist).
To help educate the community, we partnered with musicians and a popular local comedy group to produce outreach
videos. Check out the videos to get a taste of what our office and the streets of Gulu look like!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deEq_zmYvNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFQs6qvMsjM

We continue our ongoing partnerships with Gulu
City Council, GIZ (the German equivalent of
USAID), and other local organizations.
We were invited to be the Private Sector Lead to
help the partnership figure out how to recycle PET
plastic in Northern Uganda.
We’ve already outgrown the office we’re renting!
We purchased ~2 acres of land for our permanent
home on the outskirts of town, and we’re working
on plans with an architect to design and build our
own customized office and production space.
We’re excited to create a model recycling, engi-
neering, and training facility in Northern Uganda. It
will take a while to finalize the plans, get all of the
approvals, and install our own transformer, but we
hope to be able to shift to our permanent home
late next year.

Finally, and most heartwarmingly, we were able to reunite one of our production team members who used to live on the
street with his family. After being falsely accused of stealing a phone and beaten, this boy ran away from home and
walked for days to reach Gulu. After realizing the difficulties of street life, Okello [not his real name] sought help and we
offered him a job at Takataka Plastics. He worked hard and was able to provide for himself and save a fair amount of
money through our savings group at Takataka Plastics. When Okello’s father eventually realized he had wrongly accused
the boy and that Okello had grown up to provide well for himself, the father invited him back home. Okello’s mom was so
excited to see him after all this tim she ran out of her hut and threw herself onto him in a huge hug! I’ve never seen such
a heartwarming welcome home. Using his savings, Okello was able to help his mother and grandmother and is setting
up his own small business raising goats and pigs. When schools reopen in Uganda, he wants to return to school and
finish his primary education.

Stories like Okello’s are our favorite. Because helping
change lives is why we started Takataka Plastics.
Preventing plastic waste from being burned and
clogging drains is great, but the motivation that keeps
us going when things are hard is seeing the impact
that Takataka Plastics has on all of our staffs’ lives and
in the community. Thank you for partnering with us on
this journey.
As always, you can follow what we’re up to on
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and our website.
We have lots more projects in the works, so stay tuned!
With gratitude,
Paige
Co-founder
C.T.O C.O.O
Peter
Co-founder
https://twitter.com/TakatakaPlastic https://www.takatakaplastics.com/
https://www.instagram.com/takataka_plastics/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/okwoko-peter/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paigebalcom/
https://www.facebook.com/takatakaplastics

Thank You for Your Support

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