Adopt a River is our grassroots community-cleanup programme. We mobilise people
locally to clean a 10–20m stretch of polluted river beside their homes — and as
of mid-2025 we’ve removed more than three tons of waste across Kenya, including
on the Nairobi River and Kandisi River.
It started small. The team realised that for every gram of packaging we
replaced upstream, several grams of legacy plastic were sitting in waterways
downstream. Cleaning waterways isn’t HyaPak’s core product — but it’s the same
problem at the other end. So we built a weekend programme around it.
How it works
- A community group reaches out (or we reach out to them).
- We provide gloves, sacks, transport for the waste, and a short workshop on the why.
- Volunteers clear a 10–20m section over one weekend.
- Plastic waste is sorted and routed to KEPRO-registered recyclers. Organic matter is composted.
- We come back six months later to measure what stayed clean.
What it changes
The visible impact is the stretch of river that no longer looks like a dump.
The less-visible impact is harder won: a generation of school-age volunteers
who treat single-use plastic as a real, local problem with their own names on
the cleanup. That’s the part we care most about.
We’re now collaborating with conservation organisations on Kenya’s most-polluted
river, the Nairobi, and have planted thousands of seedlings in Mau Escarpment
and Ngong Forest as part of the same operation. If you want to organise a
cleanup in your community, drop us a note.