The BEGINNING
"While coasting to the urban town of Mbale, Uganda, on a bus from Kampala, you pass dozens of roadside stops filled with vendors selling snacks and hot food. The shop attendants are persistent. In their attempts to wave down cars, taxis, and any two- or four-wheeled vehicle, these stewards of sustenance demonstrate passion for making sales. Their opportunities are fleeting, as vehicles come and go quickly. It is a spectacle worth experiencing — sellers frantically fulfilling their customers’ orders while navigating a sea of arms stretched out through open car windows. Mostly, it’s bottles of water customers want, and countless bottles are handed through countless windows on any given day.
​
"I single out bottled beverages as it was common to witness, during my trips across Uganda, the same plastic beverage bottles — or other random bits of plastic — thrown out the window onto the roadside or strewn across someone’s front yard, like mine. Whether it’s bottles, plastic kaveras (bags), remnants of a past lunch or an afternoon snack wrapper, plastic is king in Uganda. It appears in various shapes, sizes, and colors. Without going into my own disdain for single-use plastic, I became inspired by this visible and all-too-common pollutant and decided to do something about it — I decided to use it."
​
​
- Michał Matejczuk, Founder & Managing Director
THE ORIGINAL, #1
The Ichupa Upcycle Project sprouted from the founder's personal experience during a challenging Ugandan dry spell, where he faced water scarcity and encountered the mounting waste in and around his small compound during his Peace Corps service (2016-'18) in Uganda.
Determined to find a solution, a small two-person team joined forces to collect any available 1L plastic bottles, aiming to alleviate their water struggles. As the collection grew from a few bottles to hundreds, expanding the team and engaging local businesses and technical experts became crucial. Despite facing skepticism, theft, and mockery, the Ichupa Upcycle Project flourished, driven by a strong commitment to community collaboration and resilience against naysayers.
However, it was the completion of our first rainwater harvesting tank that truly catapulted our efforts and silenced the doubters, propelling us forward in our mission.
THEN CAME ANOTHER EIGHT...
&
In August 2017, The Ichupa Upcycle Project was awarded a WWF Climate Crowd grant which allowed us to extend our impact beyond the confines of our founder's initial compound and bring our sustainable vision to even more communities. With the generous grant from WWF, we were able to expand our operations, scale up the creation of the Ichupa Rainwater Harvesting Tank™ using recycled bottles, and empower local communities with access to reliable water sources. The WWF Climate Crowd grant was instrumental in helping us realize our mission of environmental conservation, upcycling plastic waste, and providing sustainable water solutions.
​
The Project’s first year involved hundreds of community members, thousands of primary school students, a dozen trained masons, various technical advisors, a group of local friends, and a tremendous amount of patience to construct a total of nine rainwater catchment tanks—The Original Nine. These tanks utilized over 30,000 plastic bottles, and created a holding capacity of more than 40,000L for rainwater throughout the community of Mbale, Uganda. The Project also inspired different communities to work and speak with each other that otherwise didn’t speak to one another.
​
With being tasked to come up with their own solutions to any programmatic issues that arose, these community members continued to fund their building expenses, acquired the masons necessary to build their tanks, located the plastic bottles and the people needed to fill them, and ensured that the construction on their tanks was completed on time. In having to deal with the foreign formalities of working with different sites and negotiating with new stakeholders, the Project remained as a unique opportunity for our organization and for new communities interested in our construction design.
