Alex Rose-Innes
With more plastic waste than people on the planet, Liina Mutilifa, a green entrepreneur from Windoek in Africa, decided to make a difference.
Liina is doing her part in creating a more environmentally-friendly living space and with her entrepreneurial skill, creativity and a talented team, is producing beautiful, usable objects by recycling plastic waste in Namibia. As consumers across the world are increasingly insisting on eco-friendly products, Green Earth Creations, her brainchild, will definitely meet that demand.
Green Earth Creation’s vision is to become Namibia’s trend-setting business in the recycling manufacturing industry. Creating a variety of useful products from recycled plastic waste, the company’s most popular current item is a green denim shopping bag. Strong and durable, it appeals to stylish men and women who wish to support zero plastic waste. This young eco-entrepreneur’s creativity had led to the creation of various tastefully designed objects, simultaneously providing much needed sustainable incomes to people in the community. In order to compete with other branded products, these bespoke items are very affordable and as Liina was quoted as saying, designed to give every customer that WOW moment.
Green Earth Creation’s motto is “Our Creation, Our Pride,” reflecting the team’s artistry, creative talents and innovation. Consisting of mostly young people and university students, four adult professional tailors are tasked with sewing the shopping bags together. These bags had also soon become part of the team following Green Earth Creation’s goal of recycling, re-using, reducing the negative enviro footprint and re-purposing waste.
While her journey had seen many bright achievements, Liina is the first to admit that it had not always been plain sailing and the challenges encountered along the way, even saw the bank Green Earth Creations conducted business with, go bust. But nothing could keep these passionate young people down and with every new day, more inroads are made into a market with increasing possibilities to benefit the planet and bring about sustainable economic change. As Liina says, entrepreneurs are made to solve problems. The immediate plan for her company is to expand into neighbouring countries and in the long term find markets across the African continent for these unique products. This means South Africans would also be able to buy these products and put them to good use while being part of a solution to one of the Earth’s major problems.
