Her lived experience is propelling a crisis-solving innovation forward

As the world relies more and more upon plastic for, well, just about everything, its ills are also becoming more and more apparent.

Plastic pollution is capable of affecting land, waterways, and oceans. It’s non-biodegradable, and causes hazards to soil. It emits toxic gasses when exposed to heat, and en masse, it can block drainage lines, flood mitigation ditches, and other ballasts against natural disasters. Plastic waste is also harmful to human health—scholars suspect that microplastics found in human bodies may be the culprit behind several serious health conditions.

In Nigeria, where Northeastern University alumna Debbie Madueke was born and raised, plastic waste is a particularly dire concern. The country produces an estimated 2.5 tons of plastic waste per year, much of it in the form of disposable, single-use bags, bottles, and containers. That wasn’t always the case, Madueke says, but global trends and manufacturing pressures have created an environment ripe for plastic pollution.

And Madueke, who came to the United States as a teenager to attend Northeastern, is determined to do something about it. She created Replast, a recycling company that aims to solve plastic pollution in Nigeria by refining and reforming single-use plastics while contributing to the socio-economic advancement of a low-income population.

Madueke and her venture were recognized by the judges for this year’s Northeastern University Women Who Empower Innovator Awards. The annual awards honor entrepreneurs for their innovative, boundary-pushing work. This year’s recipients—students and alumni from the Northeastern community—were selected by a panel of judges and will receive a total of $500,000 in funding. Madueke took third place among undergraduate alumnae award winners, and second place in the speciality category, “Powering a Sustainable, Resilient World.”

“Debbie has an incredibly resourceful mind that has readily tackled any challenge she has ever come across—she’s always been an innovative, creative thinker, and I think that is really important when it comes to entrepreneurship,” says Chisom Ilogu, strategy and analytics consultant at Deloitte Consulting, and one of Madueke’s mentors.

“As one of the leading PET [polyethylene terephthalate] recycling efforts in Nigeria, Replast encourages sustainability, empowers local communities by providing jobs in their manufacturing facilities and financial compensation for collected plastics,” Ilogu says. “In a country with a bright, young population seeking employment, and an inevitable buildup of plastic waste, Replast’s potential for growth is un-capped.”

For Madueke, Replast’s potential to create jobs and other financial opportunities is just as important as its recycling capability.

“A big thing for me is creating capacity in Africa and in Nigeria specifically,” Madueke says. “I wanted to help solve this problem, but also to build capacity. The main thing about what Replast does is that, even though we’re doing the plastic recycling, which is great, we’re creating jobs. We’re solving climate issues. We’re providing opportunities for people in low-density areas.”

Unlike the model in the U.S., Nigeria doesn’t have a nationwide, government-supported recycling infrastructure, Madueke says. What that means in practice is that private companies have attempted to fill the void, to mixed degrees of success. It also means that part of Madueke’s—and Replast’s—job is to bring recycling to the forefront of people’s minds.

Broadly, plastic recycling is a multiphase process. First, a company must collect the waste material. Then comes sorting. For municipalities that use singles-stream recycling (that is: everything goes into the same bin), this step means sorting out the plastic from all the metal, cardboard, and other materials that were collected. In places where only plastic is collected, this step entails separating out various types of plastic, usually high-density and low-density plastics. Then, all the plastic is washed to remove stuck-on food, oils, and stickers. Next, all the clean plastic is shredded into small flakes. Those flakes are melted down and recombined in the final step: extrusion. Recycling companies push out clean, uniform plastic pellets that can be sold to manufacturers to be remade into new, useful products.

In Nigeria, Madueke says there are a handful of companies that specialize in certain parts of this process—but few that are equipped to handle the entire operation from top to bottom. That’s where Replast comes in.

“Right before I made the pitch to Women Who Empower, we had just made our first big sale,” Madueke says, an exciting and validating milestone for a company that’s only a few years old and is largely “just trying to keep the lights on,” she adds, with a laugh.

“We’re hoping, at some point, to expand to multiple regions,” especially in the harder-to-reach communities outside of Lagos, Madueke says. “That’s my dream, to have multiple sectors.”

Madueke, who works full time as a finance analyst at Google, travels back and forth to Nigeria three or four times a year to check in with the folks who work at Replast, and to spread the good word. Running a business halfway around the world, though, is a challenge in itself.

“Everything is surprising,” she says. There are times when the power inexplicably goes out. Operating costs fluctuate with world economic trends—in fact, the cost of doing business now is as much as four times as expensive as it was even two years ago, Madueke says.

“It’s just this array of complex issues that come up every day,” she says. “Things happen. So what it is teaching me is to be able to adapt when things change, and to quickly react and move on, because the next minute there’s something else.”

And, as she looks to the future, Madueke hopes that Replast can continue to grow into its mission: “to be a business that’s solving community problems, creating capacity for the community, and also filling infrastructural gaps in Nigeria,” she says.