How Ele Collection Co. Turns Plastic Waste into Something Beautiful

Let’s be honest, when most of us think of plastic recycling, we imagine neat rows of colour-coded bins, trucks humming down clean suburban streets, or a blue logo stamped on a bottle. That’s not how it works in Zimbabwe - or most places in Africa.

In Victoria Falls, the plastic is dumped, sun-baked, trampled, dirty. It’s buried in the bush, piled along roadsides, and scattered across landscapes that elephants and other wildlife still call ‘home.’ It’s not the type of plastic most systems know how to handle. So, Ele Collection had to find a system that could. It wasn’t easy until…

That’s when one of Ben’s friends introduced the team to Plazrok – a Kiwi-born technology developed by a bunch of brilliant “old-school” engineers. It sounded almost too good to be true: a process that takes all seven types of plastic (even if it’s mixed or filthy), and locks it into a lightweight, strong, fire-resistant concrete aggregate.

Unlike traditional recycling, this technology doesn’t need plastic to be washed, sorted or exported. The plastic gets shredded – both soft and hard types – and blended with crushed glass, fly ash and quarry stones. It’s heated (not burned) into a paste-like consistency, cut into tiny balls, and turned into something useful: a material that replaces river sand and stone in concrete.

Better for the planet. Better for Zimbabwe’s roads. And so much better for the future. Watch this video by Ben Norton giving you a sneak peak into what goes on at the recycling plant. 

This isn’t just a place of work. It’s become a place of learning and pride. Visitors can tour the facility, see the machines running, and even toss in a piece of plastic themselves. Watching waste transform into something valuable is strangely emotional. It makes you believe in second chances – for plastic, for people, for conservation, for entire countries and villages.

This entire setup? It took years. From assembling machines in Thailand, to navigating start-up life in Zimbabwe with nothing but passion and an Excel sheet. But somehow, this extraordinary team is now here. Running. Making it real.

And with the help of partners like Anywhere in Africa Safaris they’re dreaming even bigger. 

“We’ve called Vic Falls our pilot. Our seed. But it’s growing. And we believe it can spread across Africa. Because when something works this beautifully, you don’t keep it to yourself.” - Ben Norton

This blog series (read Part 1 and Part 2) is a reminder as to why we do what we do at Anywhere in Africa Safaris. For every guest who visits Zimbabwe, Zambia or Victoria Falls we donate a portion of every booking to this mission - over the last 3 months we have donated $3,200 (USD) which is equivalent to 3.2 tonnes recovered ($1,000/tonne). Read Impact Report here to find out more about this donation.

For more detail, read this Impact Report we received just last week from Ben and the team at Ele Collection Co. If you feel moved by this, we urge you to please get in contact with Ben Norton for more information on joining forces or donating: ben@elecollection.co.