Kenyan engineer Joseph Nguthiru turns invasive water hyacinth into biodegradable plastic — reducing

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Ladies and gentlemen, this is the future of packaging.

[00:00:03]We found a way of making products that look like plastics, feel like plastics, and even perform just like plastics, but they decompose at the end of their lifetime. My name is Joseph Gacheru, and I am the UN Young Champion of the Earth. We produce this out of water hyacinth, the world's most invasive aquatic weed. [music] It's a weed that grows on top of lakes and waterways in more than 70 countries around the world, mostly in the global south.

[00:00:34]Blocks fishing, navigation, irrigation, kills fish, and is even a breeding [music] ground for mosquitoes that then cause malaria to the local communities.

[00:00:43]It reproduces incredibly fast, every 6 to 12 days, and that's why it's so hard to manage. I found out that by extracting the cellulose out of the plant, we can make a product that's just as flexible, durable, and performing just like plastics. At my startup, HyaPak, we now work [music] together with these affected fishing communities to harvest the water hyacinth for us and dry it, >> [music] >> and by doing that they earn money. So far, creating over 45 green jobs for them. Just as you would break up from a toxic relationship, let's break up from [music] a toxic relationship with plastics. It is time to let single-use plastics remain single.