COP30: Why Kenya’s street boys may be the real environmentalists

Every day across Kenyan cities, a quiet, invisible system of recycling unfolds. It doesn’t involve tech startups, glossy ESG reports, or government policy. It’s powered by barefoot boys with sacks on their backs - chokoraa - scavenging the streets for plastic.

These boys are the foot soldiers of Kenya’s urban waste economy. While corporate executives sit in panel discussions on circular economies, and while counties promise greener cities, it is these children who are literally picking up the pieces. They collect our plastic, our bottles, our carelessly discarded packaging, and sell it to middlemen, often for less than Ksh.30 per kilo.

According to the Kenya Association of Waste Recyclers, over 60% of plastic waste collected for recycling in urban centres comes from informal actors, including street children and waste pickers. Nairobi alone generates approximately 500 tonnes of plastic waste daily, and only 9% is formally recycled. The rest? It is these boys, not policies or PR campaigns, who keep it from clogging rivers and choking landfills

Without uniforms, budgets, or even homes, these boys are doing what most of us won’t: cleaning up our mess.

And yet, sustainability in Kenya continues to be narrated from polished stages. It has become a language of privilege, filled with buzzwords like “carbon offset,” “net-zero,” and “climate-smart innovation,” none of which apply to the boys breathing in smoke at Dandora or trudging barefoot through Ngara’s trash heaps.

This is the problem: we’ve professionalized sustainability to the point of exclusion.

If sustainability is truly about people, planet, and profit, then where are the people? Not the panelists, the real people. The children who reduce plastic pollution every day, not for the planet’s glory, but for survival. Where are they in our conversations? Where is their share in the value chain?

What’s worse? The system exploits them twice. First, by forcing them to survive in the margins. Then, by profiting from their labor with no recognition. The plastic they collect enters formal recycling streams that feed industries, create jobs, and boost green credentials. But not theirs.

It’s time we stopped romanticizing recycling and started confronting who’s really doing the work.

As the world heads to COP30 in Brazil later this year, with global leaders expected to ramp up commitments on climate finance, adaptation, and just transitions, Kenya must bring a grounded message to the table: real sustainability starts with real people. If the informal recyclers in Nairobi and Kisumu are not part of our green transformation, then we risk building climate solutions that look good on paper, but collapse in practice. COP30 should not only be about carbon, it must also be about justice.

If Kenya is serious about environmental sustainability  and building an equitable circular economy, then we must do more than just promote recycling. We must formalize and protect the informal actors who enable it.

Kenya’s sustainability movement cannot afford to be performative. We must expand its definition to include informal actors such as the boys under the bridge, the women sifting through dumpsites, and the unseen hands that make our cities livable.

We need policies that protect them. Supply chains that pay them fairly. And narratives that honor their contribution.

Until then, every ESG report that omits them is incomplete. Every clean city is, in truth, a stage built on invisible backs.

Sustainability must stop being a boardroom performance. It must descend into the streets, where the real environmentalists live.

Mr Enock Bii is the founder and CEO of ClimaVox Consult, a Nairobi-based Pan-African sustainability and strategic communications firm.