NAIROBI
The Kenyan presidency announced Thursday plans by a German investor to set up a 400-million-dollar waste recycling plant in the capital Nairobi.
"We shall construct the plant at Dandora dump site in Nairobi," the presidency quoted Frank Masuhur of Sustainable Energy Management Company Managing Partner as saying.
"The project will absorb two thousand tons of waste daily," Masuhur said, adding that the waste would be converted into 70 megawatts of power added to the national grid.
According to Kenya Power, a power distributor, the country's current total installed national grid electricity is 1,880 megawatts.
Although the Dandora dump site has been declared full by authorities, still more than 2000 tons of waste continue to be dumped at the site every day from various parts of Nairobi, a city of nearly four million people.
Dandora, one of Africa's largest garbage dumps, it sprawls over twelve hectares.
It has been declared by the New York-based Blacksmith Institute as one of the most polluted sites in the world.
Waste generated by Nairobi residents include toxic mix of plastic, rubber, broken glass, rusty tins, hospital needles, surgical razor blades, leftovers and paper.
The dump site is home to scavengers who live and work there.
Masuhur said the waste recycling plant will create 1000 jobs directly and indirectly.
He made the remarks shortly after former German president Horst Kohler led a group of German investors to a meeting with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta at official residence in Nairobi.
The first-ever East Africa-Germany business conference opened in Nairobi on Wednesday, bringing together more than 400 hundreds foreign investors, mostly from Germany.
Official government statistics show that more than one hundred German companies operate in Kenya.
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