Most of our clean-ups deal with a fairly predictable mix of plastic litter, dumped construction debris and general household waste. A recent clean-up around the edges of Umoja market was a genuinely different case, market waste behaves differently, arrives in far larger daily volumes, and needed us to adapt our usual approach in ways worth documenting for any group considering a similar market-adjacent clean-up.
Why market waste is a different problem
The waste accumulating along the market's edges was a mix of organic produce offcuts, packaging material, and waste that had clearly built up over an extended period rather than a single recent dumping incident, market activity generates waste daily, at a volume well beyond what a typical residential street produces. That meant our usual estimate of equipment and time, based on residential and riparian clean-ups, undershot badly for the actual scale of what needed clearing.
The organic component was also a much larger share of the total than we typically encounter, produce offcuts and spoiled stock rather than the smaller volumes of kitchen waste we see at residential sites. That turned out to be useful rather than purely a complication, since it meant a large share of what we collected was genuinely divertible to composting rather than requiring general disposal.
Adapting our usual sorting approach
We adjusted our standard three-way sorting, general waste, recyclables, organics, to weight more heavily toward organic collection given the volume involved, bringing in a local urban farmer we've worked with before who was able to take a significant portion of the organic waste directly for composting at scale rather than it going to general disposal. Packaging material, much of it plastic and cardboard from produce transport, went to our usual recycling partner, who noted this collection was a notably higher volume than our residential clean-ups typically produce.
We also worked with a handful of market traders directly during the clean-up, rather than only with estate leadership as we would at a residential site, since traders had the clearest sense of which specific spots were the worst-affected and, in a few cases, were themselves the ones dumping offcuts in an informal spot for lack of a better option.
What we learned about sustaining it afterward
A single clean-up day around an active market has a shorter shelf life than one on a residential street, given how quickly daily market activity regenerates the same kind of waste. That made the conversation about ongoing arrangements more urgent than usual: we're now in discussion with market leadership about a lighter, more frequent collection arrangement specifically for the organic waste stream, potentially routing it directly to our urban farming partner on an ongoing basis rather than relying on periodic large clean-ups to catch what accumulates in the meantime.
That kind of ongoing arrangement, if it comes together, would be a genuinely different model from our estate clean-up roster, closer to a standing waste-diversion partnership than a quarterly clean-up visit, and one we think could be worth replicating at other markets in Embakasi East if it proves workable here first.
Why we took this one on despite the added complexity
Market waste is a real, visible problem in the area, and it's one that's genuinely harder to address through our usual clean-up model, which is exactly why we felt it was worth the extra planning effort to figure out an adapted approach rather than avoiding it as too different from our usual sites. We'll report back on how the ongoing organic waste arrangement develops, and we're open to advising other community groups facing a similar market-adjacent waste problem elsewhere in Nairobi.
What surprised us most about this clean-up
Beyond the sheer volume, what stood out most was how much the market waste stream could actually be diverted once we had the right partners in place. We'd gone in expecting a large share of what we collected to end up as general waste simply because of the mixed, messy nature of market debris, offcuts tangled with packaging, spoiled stock mixed with genuine litter. In practice, once separated properly, a meaningful majority of the total volume was divertible, either to composting or recycling, a considerably better outcome than our initial expectations going into the day.
That finding has shifted how we think about market waste generally: it isn't inherently harder to divert than residential waste, it's simply a different mix that needs the right partners lined up in advance, an organic waste taker capable of handling volume, and a recycler used to dealing with produce-related packaging. We're carrying that lesson into conversations about whether a similar approach could work at other markets in Embakasi East.
We're documenting this case in more detail than usual precisely because market clean-ups are a genuinely different undertaking from our standard residential and riparian sites, and we'd rather other community groups considering something similar learn from what we adapted here than repeat the same underestimation of scale and organic waste volume that caught us out on our first attempt. If your group is planning a market-adjacent clean-up elsewhere in Nairobi, we're glad to share more detail on the partners and sorting approach that worked for us.