In Mitaboni, a town in Kenya’s Machakos County, discarded glass bottles once littered streets, piled up near bars, and ended up in landfills. A local project called EcoBitz now treats that same waste as work worth paying for — and it pays in bitcoin. The wallet many of those recyclers and merchants use is Fedi, a community-focused Bitcoin app that sits on top of the Fedimint protocol. The story is specific, not a continent-wide rollout: the best-documented case is Kenya, where EcoBitz and partners such as Afribit Kibera are stitching recycling labor, Lightning payments, and community custody into one circular loop.
From street glass to a waste-to-bitcoin idea
According to a detailed August 24, 2026 profile on Fedi’s own blog, EcoBitz began with Kelvin Makini. In November 2023 he returned to Mitaboni with an electrical-engineering degree and few openings in his trade. What he did see, every morning, was glass. Bottles were left in the streets as if they belonged there.
“I was moved to start recycling because no one else was doing it,” Makini told Fedi’s Frank Corva. “People were just leaving their glass bottles in the streets, and I thought to myself, ‘What can I do about this?’”
He started early, collecting what he could. Storage filled up — upwards of 20 sacks of glass — until a recycling company finally came, took the load, and paid him. That first sale was the spark. The model still needed a better money than a thin margin in Kenyan shillings.
Makini learned Bitcoin through Felix Mukungu and The Core, a Kenyan Bitcoin education nonprofit, including the My First Bitcoin diploma. Mentors at BitBiashara (Bitcoin education for entrepreneurs) and Afribit (a Bitcoin circular-economy project in Kibera) helped him frame the project. The name he landed on fused both halves of the work: “Eco” for the environmental ecosystem, “Bit” for Bitcoin. EcoBitz was born as a waste-to-bitcoin initiative.
How the recycling loop actually pays
The payment unit is deliberately small and memorable. EcoBitz pays recyclers 21 sats per bottle they collect — sats being the smallest unit of bitcoin. Collection is not limited to curbside litter. The team gathers glass from streets, landfills, and from clubs, shops, and bars that serve drinks in bottles. Makini has also paid establishment owners in bitcoin for the glasses they hand over.
That is the core loop: labor removes glass from the environment; bitcoin settles the wage; local merchants who accept bitcoin close the circle when workers spend what they earned. Fedi’s write-up quotes Makini on why that circle matters: recyclers getting paid in sats, spending sats on basic needs, and eventually saving sats together.
Public reporting does not yet publish a verified total for bottles collected or sats distributed across EcoBitz’s lifetime. What is documented is the unit rate, the collection channels, and how payments move through community tools — not a national tonnage figure. That gap is worth keeping in mind when the story travels beyond Kenya.
Why bitcoin instead of M-Pesa alone
Makini’s first recycling sale was paid in Kenyan shillings. He still argues bitcoin is a better fit for the work for several concrete reasons, as reported by Fedi:
- Inflation bite on thin margins. He said he used to clear about 2 KES of profit per bottle, and inflation kept eroding that. Holding labor value in bitcoin, in his view, preserves purchasing power better than parking tiny fiat margins.
- Lower fees on small Lightning payments. He compared Lightning Network fees favorably with M-Pesa, Kenya’s dominant mobile-money rail, for the sizes EcoBitz moves.
- ID requirements. M-Pesa generally requires a national ID. Not everyone has one. Bitcoin wallets do not inherit that same gate.
- Preference shift over time. Some recyclers still want fiat. Makini says preference for sats grows as people see bitcoin behave differently from local currency.
None of that makes bitcoin magical. It makes it a tool chosen for price stability relative to a tiny cash margin, for cheap small payments, and for accessibility. Those are local, practical reasons — the ones that show up when a recycling crew has to get paid today.
Upcycling: bottles become products, not only feedstock
EcoBitz does not only sell raw glass to recyclers anymore. Unbroken bottles are cleaned, polished, and styled into finished glassware — drinking glasses and other home pieces. For branding and cutting work, Makini travels about three hours by bus from Mitaboni to a Nairobi shop that has the machines. His longer-term goal is to bring that equipment to Mitaboni so more of the value — and more of the bitcoin payments for the work — stays in town.
That product line showed up on a bigger stage at the Bitcoin Nairobi Conference, where EcoBitz displayed glassware at the Fedi booth alongside Afribit’s upcycled tote bags and purses. Attendees bought pieces and paid in bitcoin directly to EcoBitz’s Fedi wallet through the Afribit Kibera federation. The booth doubled as an onboarding desk: wallets were created and tested on the spot.
Where Fedi fits: community custody, not just another wallet
Fedi is more than a send/receive app. The company, founded in 2022 by Obi Nwosu, Justin Moon, and Eric Sirion, launched its “community superapp” publicly in August 2024. Under the hood is Fedimint: a federation of Guardians runs a shared multisignature bitcoin setup and mints Chaumian ecash — privacy-preserving claims on the community’s bitcoin reserves. Fedi’s preferred phrase for this model is community custody: users trust a known local group of Guardians rather than a single company or a sole seed phrase they might lose.
In practice, EcoBitz’s team often spends sats via the Afribit Kibera federation inside Fedi. Makini has said they are comfortable with that federation because they know Afribit and can reach Guardians when something breaks. EcoBitz also runs an active Fedi Community space where the recycling initiative posts price changes for recyclables and settles payments. A recycler can create an invoice and share it in that space.
Next on their roadmap is Fedi’s Multispend feature — a shared-group fund (tied to Stable Balance, a bitcoin balance pegged to a fiat value) where deposits, withdrawal requests, and threshold votes keep a treasury transparent. Makini has described Multispend as a way to manage sats from recycling and cleanups, support merchant networks, and keep community savings under shared control rather than one person’s phone.
That stacking — federation wallet, community chat/space, invoices for recyclers, Multispend for a shared treasury — is how Fedi “enables” the glass-for-bitcoin story. It does not collect the bottles. It gives the people who do a place to get paid, coordinate, and save together without routing every sat through a traditional bank or a single custodian.
Kibera’s parallel track: Afribit and sats-for-waste
Afribit Kibera is a related but distinct project in one of East Africa’s largest informal settlements. In an April 2025 Medium post, the Afribit team described a Bitcoin circular economy woven into community waste management. Young people earn sats weekly for collecting, sorting, and storing recyclables. Those sats are spent at onboarded merchants — local vendors and WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene) services. Participants complete about 15 hours of Bitcoin education before earning. A youth-run buyback program called “Taka Sats” (roughly “Waste Sats” in Swahili) trades recyclables and e-waste for sats, then sells bulk waste to larger recyclers and converts proceeds back into bitcoin.
Afribit’s own write-up focuses on Lightning and local merchant rails; Fedi’s EcoBitz profile is where the Afribit Kibera federation appears as the custody and payment layer EcoBitz trusts. Together, the two sources paint a Kenya-centered scene: Machakos County glass collection and upcycling on one side, Kibera waste-and-merchant loops on the other, with Fedi as shared infrastructure where those communities want community custody.
Who benefits — and who still struggles
Recyclers and collectors get paid for work that used to be unpaid cleanup or informal scavenging with shaky settlement. Bars and shops can offload empties for bitcoin instead of treating them as trash. Upcycled-product buyers at conferences and in the community get glassware with a story attached. Merchants in circular-economy networks gain customers who already hold sats. Community organizers get a shared ledger and chat surface for prices and invoices.
Afribit’s Medium post is candid about friction that any similar program will hit: parents who distrust youths’ sats earnings; merchants who skip training; people without smartphones (Afribit has looked at Bolt Cards and POS hardware); spouses pressuring women merchants to quit; social norms around which businesses belong in a “community-first” merchant set. EcoBitz still has recyclers who prefer fiat. Upcycling still depends on a Nairobi machine shop until Mitaboni has its own.
Those limits matter. This is not a finished national recycling system. It is a set of grassroots Bitcoin circular-economy experiments, with Fedi as one of the tools communities chose when they needed private-ish, low-fee, group-friendly custody.
What is next for EcoBitz
Makini’s roadmap, as told to Fedi, is concrete:
- Use upcycled glass as packaging for a small-scale EcoBitz honey farm, so buyers can trace harvest and container together.
- Find better uses for crushed cullet (waste glass) — floor tiles, table bases, home décor — so less glass hits landfills.
- Bring cutting and branding machines to Mitaboni.
- Roll Multispend into a shared treasury for recycling proceeds, cleanups, and merchant networks.
- Treat the whole stack as a blueprint other communities can copy: earn sats for waste work, spend locally, save together.
Fedi itself continues to show up at African Bitcoin gatherings — including as a sponsor of the Africa Bitcoin Conference 2025 — with workshops on community custody and products built for African circular economies. That conference circuit is how projects like EcoBitz meet wallet teams, mentors, and buyers in the same weekend.
How to read the “Africa” headline honestly
Headlines often stretch a Kenya story into a continental claim. The primary sources for glass-to-bitcoin via Fedi center on Mitaboni/Machakos (EcoBitz) and Kibera, Nairobi (Afribit federation and circular-economy partners), with Fedi as the community wallet and coordination layer. Broader Fedi activity across Africa includes conference work and other community federations, but the glass-recycling-for-sats case that is well documented today is Kenyan.
Scale numbers beyond the 21-sats-per-bottle rate and qualitative growth (team expansion, conference sales, active Fedi space) are thin in public sources. Treat EcoBitz as a living proof-of-concept with named partners and a published payment rule — not as a verified national diversion statistic.
The bigger idea in one sentence
Fedi does not recycle glass. People in Mitaboni and Kibera do. What Fedi supplies is a Bitcoin rail designed for groups: community custody through Guardians, Lightning-linked spending, chat spaces for invoices and prices, and Multispend for shared treasuries. When those rails meet a waste stream that used to earn almost nothing, a bottle on the roadside can become a sat in a wallet — and, if the circular economy holds, a purchase at a neighbor’s stall the same week.
Makini put the alignment more sharply in Fedi’s interview: environmental responsibility and Bitcoin self-responsibility rhyme. “It’s the same with Bitcoin. It’s about personal responsibility — not your keys, not your coins. There’s alignment between Bitcoin and environmentalism, for real.”
Sources
- Frank Corva, “EcoBitz: Environmentalism Meets Bitcoin in Kenya,” Fedi blog, August 24, 2026 — fedi.xyz
- AFRIBIT KIBERA, “The Afribit Kibera Circular Economy Project: Bitcoin, Waste, and Financial Sovereignty,” Medium, April 14, 2025
- Alex Bergeron, “Fedi Launches A Bitcoin Operating System For Communities,” Bitcoin Magazine, August 7, 2024
- Frank Corva, “Fedi Combines Bitcoin And Other Freedom Tech With Community,” Bitcoin Magazine, August 13, 2024
- Fedi, “Community Custody: A Way to Hold Bitcoin Without Carrying All the Risk Yourself,” and “How to Use Multispend,” fedi.xyz blog
- Fedi, “Fedi at the Africa Bitcoin Conference 2025,” fedi.xyz blog