Flipflopi Impact

The argument at the heart of Flipflopi's 2025 Annual Impact Report is one ten years in the making: you cannot end plastic pollution without changing the system that produces it. 

Ten years ago, we set out to prove that single-use plastic doesn't make sense — building the world's first fully recycled plastic sailing dhow and taking the #PlasticRevolution on expeditions across East Africa. In 2022, awareness turned into the next chapter of action: a community-owned circular economy in Lamu that recovers plastic, recycles it locally, and keeps the value with the people who make the system work. 

In our years of operation, we’ve built tangible evidence to show that plastic pollution is a symptom of our economic system that externalises cost onto the communities least able to absorb it. Dominant circular economy models risk compounding this. Too often they are capital-intensive, volume-driven, and designed for scale - not for the people and places that need them most.

Solving plastic pollution can indeed be a gateway to transforming the systems that produce it but that has to be grounded in practical and tangible actions that directly benefit the people and ecosystem that are most affected by it on a daily basis. And this is what we are most proud of and keeps us going.

You can read the full honest version in the report: what's still hard about building enterprises where poverty is immediate, and why 76% of what we pull out of Siyu's mangroves isn't “plastic” at all — it's clothing.

Stubborn Optimism

In 2016 we set out to build a +20mts traditional lateen sailing dhow made entirely from recycled plastics on Lamu Island, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, off the coast of Kenya.

Not surprisingly we failed...but we did succeed to build a 9mt dhow made from 10 tons of recycled plastics - which was the first of its kind globally.

Flipflopi Ndogo (Swahili for "Small") has sailed across East African waters in land and on the ocean, garnering recognition as "Africa's Blue Planet Moment". That was just the beginning...and the journey begins exactly where we started: to build a 24mt dhow made from waste plastic lumber which will weigh over 60 tons. The building of this dhow and the subsequent expeditions across the globe will be the manifestation of systemic change, one that leaves no one behind - this is our mission: this is a Plastic Revolution.