Battling the world's most invasive aquatic plant
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 796 Ratings
🗓️ 15 November 2024
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It was on a university trip that Kenyan entrepreneur Joseph Nguthiru first came across water hyacinth in Lake Naivasha.
It is an incredibly harmful and invasive weed that is currently blocking waterways and devastating fish populations all over the world.
Joseph, who was an engineering student at the time, tells us how he came up with a solution to use the plant as a material for making packaging - and how he's founded a successful business, HyaPak Ecotech, as a result.
Produced and presented by Zawadi Mudibo
(Image: Fishermen removing water hyacinth from the net in Lake Victoria in Kisumu, western Kenya in 2018)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:05.5 | I'm Zawadi, Mdibo. |
| 0:07.2 | Today, we're in Kenya to meet a young climate tech entrepreneur |
| 0:11.5 | whose story starts back when he was on a school trip. |
| 0:15.3 | Our boat got stuck in the middle of the lake because of some aquatic weeds |
| 0:19.8 | flowing around the boat. |
| 0:22.2 | That's Joseph Ngutiru, and finding a way to not only clear the world's most problematic |
| 0:27.5 | aquatic weed, water hyacinth, but then find a positive use for them has become his passion |
| 0:34.3 | and his business. What you're trying to do here is to try and kill two bars with the same stone. |
| 0:39.6 | This one of what a hyacinth, being an ecological problem to the blue economy, |
| 0:43.9 | and plastic waste pollution, which everyone knows. |
| 0:47.9 | And we're not trying to use one problem to solve the other problem. |
| 0:53.3 | Here we go. |
| 1:03.0 | Yeah. other problem. I am in a fishing boat on Kenya's Lake Naivasha. You can hear the gentle water lapping against the boat. |
| 1:09.0 | With the periodic splashing of pedals as fishermen work diligently. |
| 1:16.4 | It is daybreak, and as we glide across the serene surface of this lake, |
| 1:22.3 | located about a hundred miles northwest of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, |
| 1:27.0 | I see faces of optimism. |
| 1:30.1 | The distant coals of low-flying pelicans echo the background. |
| 1:35.9 | A reminder of the let's reach biodiversity. |
| 1:41.0 | Today we are outfishing, or more accurately harvesting, not fish by the invasive water hyacinth, |
| 1:49.1 | a seaweed that has caused havoc to this vital lakes ecosystem. |
... |
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