A Swiss foundation giving a second life to organic waste in Benin

In the municipality of Toffo, in the south of the West African country, ReBin has been transforming local organic waste into compost and biogas since 2018.

During the writing of his MBA dissertation in 2016, Mark Giannelli decided to turn theory into practice and created his own foundation. After visiting several sites in Africa, he chose Benin as the place to launch his project. And in less than a year, local craftspeople built an organic waste treatment plant on a one-hectare site, a ten-minute drive from the Houègbo market.

Villagers and local vegetable-growers bring peel and other organic leftovers to the centre, and get money in return. With this, they can also buy the centre’s products: fish, compost, biogas, or water. In five years, the number of registered users has doubled, as has the amount of biogas produced – a renewable resource, much less polluting as a household cooking gas compared with wood or coal.

Giannelli regularly travels to Benin to build partnerships with public and private groups. The expertise he has built up in the country is in demand elsewhere. “We are working as part of a circular economy development programme in Mauritania, along with the UNHCR and the German development ministry,” says the Geneva-based entrepreneur. “The main goal is to optimise green value chains, to reduce the immense pressure on the environment and natural resources. Also there, biogas represents an indispensable alternative to wood and coal.”

This report was produced as part of the En Quête d’Ailleurs (EQDAExternal link) project, an exchange between Swiss and developing country journalists. This year, eight two-person journalist teams worked on the theme of “Waste, a collective responsibility”. Espoir Hounmabou, a journalist at Eden TV/Diaspora FM in Benin, chose to exploreExternal link a litter awareness campaign conducted in Switzerland.