About L’Africaine d’architecture:
L’Africaine d’architecture is an international organization encouraging a more integrated approach to the field of architecture and the African city. Since July 2012, the association has been testing its urban utopia in Lomé; "HubCité Africaines", which triggered the establishment of the WoeLab incubator network, which has become the center of the Togolese tech-scene.

About WoeLab:
Open to all, the WoeLab, with its 1300m² of space, is an incubator based in Lomé, Togo, where new approaches of productive collaboration and inclusive entrepreneurship in an African context.
WoeLab aims to welcome and accompany young people and unpack their potential by introducing them to the startup culture.

No more plastic waste in nature!

SCoPE (Sorting & Collecting Plastics in our Environment) wants to provide solutions to the plastic waste problem through ecological innovation in the African context. We create a local plastic bank and use 1) an alert system (eco-beep) 2) real-time collection monitoring to encourage people to divide & help us collect plastic waste from a household.

People should simply signup and subscribe our service, and receive our collection kit. They then have to fill in plastic waste and let us know by beeping the exo-beep. We'll then come and get the waste. The SCoPE service has now 47 users in a neighborhood, within a radius of 1 kilometer around SCoPE's current offices. Users usually fill in a kit collection bag in about 1 month before asking us to pick it up.

The idea of the project is based on a simple observation: Lomé produces more than 3 million tons of waste per year, but only 300,000 tons per year are collected and transported to the only waste treatment center. The absence of ambitious policies of selective sorting makes Lomé one of the most vulnerable cities in the world to plastic pollution. The lack of public garbage cans and functional collection systems encourage people to throw their garbage directly into the streets.

Tons of plastic are used every day in households, services, markets, schools, etc., but the resulting waste is very poorly managed and thus endangers the environment. However, there are companies that are interested in recycling, but their suppliers, i.e. the collecting population, are faced with the problems of collection conditions (dumps, garbage cans, gutters, etc.).