Our Process Header

CELEBRATING

PEOPLE

AND

PLANET

OUR PROCESS

FROM WASTE TO WORTH

01 COLLECTING

Our Waste Collection team, William and Francis, collect plastic and cigarette butts from the streets, local dumps, scrapyards, businesses and households. They pop everything in the trailer, cycle back to the workshop and weigh the collected waste.

02 PREPPING

Our Plastics team, Annia, Matrina and Brenda sort, wash and dry the waste. The team then transform the plastic into durable heat-sealed sheets using irons.

03 FINISHING

Our Tailors, Henry, Noah and Precious make the patterns, cut the materials and create the products by hand, with the help of manual sewing machines. After everyone signs their name on the tag, Henry then personally packs up the order and delivers it to DHL in Mzuzu.

WHOLESALER
HEROES

OUR RETAILERS

We currently stock our &Proud products in 12 lovely shops in Europe, USA and Africa. Wholesalers are our heroes because by selling our products they enable us to provide higher wages and up-skilling opportunities for our staff and to create a bigger impact for our community — by collecting and recycling more local waste and doing more outreach campaigns.

Want to join the crew? Email us at hello@andproudafrica.com

OUR MATERIALS

NO NEW PLASTIC

We collect plastic and cigarette butts from the streets, local dumps, scrapyards, businesses and households. This waste gets transformed into our stand-out products with the help of some other locally-sourced materials.

We source our striking African wax cotton, chitenje, from multiple suppliers, like Justina and Nophter, at the local Mataifa Market.

Malawians are resourceful people! Many locals salvage and recycle used materials. Smart, one of our suppliers, recycles inner tyre tubes into leather-like strips. We source our old sheet roofing, salvaged seatbelts and scrap metal from people like Smart.

Our hessian and yarn is bought locally from Max. We also collaborate with Chabwela, a local craftsman, to create buckles and buttons using recycled scrap metal.

RESPONSIBILITY

KIND TO PEOPLE & PLANET

Ethical Employment

Each of our (incredible!) team members are local residents of Mzuzu and our permanent employees. We provide a safe workplace, fair wage and nutritious lunch daily. We supply on-site training and up-skilling opportunities.

We go beyond by offering our staff pension and life insurance options and support with nursery and school fees. We also provide physio sessions and we offer Moon Cups to our female staff.

Sustainability

We collect waste from the streets, local dumps, scrapyards, businesses and households. We salvage many materials, from loose plastics to tin sheet roofing. Each product recycles at least 5 plastic bags. One tree is planted in Malawi with Root to Fruit for every online order.

We collect the local waste by bicycle and trailer. We harvest rainwater to clean the collected waste and use human power instead of powered tools as much as possible. We give wax cotton off-cuts to local women in need to create mats.