01 — The line
What we do
Five steps take material from a stockpile to a specified industrial input. The first two are physical work. The middle one is what makes the last two possible.
01 — Recovery
Recovery
Material is lifted by hand from stockpiles and processing residue at sites in the Kisii–Nyamira belt, under arrangement with the parties controlling those sites. The work is manual: selecting from a heap, filling, tying and moving sacks over ground that is steep and, for much of the year, wet.
Two things distinguish recovery as a step from simply collecting. The first is selectivity. What is taken is chosen, because material that should not be in the consignment is cheapest to exclude before it enters it. The second is that the recovery event is the moment a lot begins to exist, which is why capture happens here rather than later.
The documentation establishing our basis for access at each site is being assembled and is not yet in a form a buyer could review. We state that on what we cannot yet show.
02 — Grading
Grading
Recovered material is screened into size fractions and assessed for composition, moisture and contamination. At this scale the screening is done with hand sieves and the assessment by experienced physical inspection, supported by laboratory analysis where a buyer requires it.
Grading is the step that turns a heap into a described product. It is also the step where the enterprise commits to a claim, since a stated grade is what a buyer plans a process around. The difficulty is not in separating coarse from fine. It is in sampling a lot so that the description holds for the whole of it rather than for the part that happened to be reachable.
This is skilled work, it depends on knowing the local material, and it stays in the county. What grading actually is sets out the method in full.
03 — Traceability
Traceability
Each lot is given an identity at the point of recovery and keeps it. Weight, grade, moisture, a photograph, coordinates, the handler and a timestamp are captured once, where the material is first handled, and are afterwards referenced rather than restated.
This is the middle step for a reason. Everything before it is work that was already being done in this area, by these women, without anyone recording it. Everything after it depends on the record existing. Traceability is not an administrative layer over the operation. It is the part that makes the material assessable and priceable by a buyer, and payable to the woman who recovered it.
Lot identity describes what is captured and why nothing is retyped afterwards.
04 — Settlement
Settlement
Payment is calculated from a recorded weight and a recorded grade against an agreed rate. It is not negotiated at the roadside at the end of the day over a sack whose weight nobody has measured.
The difference is not mainly about the amount, though the amount usually changes. It is that a calculation can be checked by both parties from inputs both can see, and a judgement about the appearance of a sack cannot. Attribution matters as much: the handler is named on the lot, so consistency and volume accumulate to the woman who produced them.
Settlement has to be prompt to be worth having. An arrangement that pays better but three weeks later is worse than the roadside for anyone without savings, and saying so is part of designing it honestly.
05 — Industrial reuse
Industrial reuse
Graded material moves to a prospective industrial user as a specified input, priced against what it displaces rather than accepted as a favour.
Our reference route for graded material is cement manufacture. That describes what the material is suited to and the kind of process that consumes inputs of this type in volume. It does not describe a customer. There is no signed offtake contract, and we do not name a manufacturer, because no agreement exists that would make naming one accurate.
Industrial symbiosis in plain terms sets out where the circular gain actually sits, and the four ways arrangements of this kind usually fail.
