The Hub

Why we're building it

Meraki Daat has been turning ocean plastic into eco-bricks since 2022. The method works: waste comes off the shoreline, gets shredded and pressed, and goes back into the village as pathways and building material. It won the UNDP Malaysia Island Innovation Challenge in 2025.

But it is done by hand, on the ground, under whatever shade we can find. Every batch depends on volunteers being available that week. When the monsoon comes, the work stops. When our team is elsewhere, the plastic piles up on the shoreline.

The Hub is a permanent facility in Kota Kinabalu with proper shredding and pressing equipment, dry storage, and a training space. Plastic collected from the water villages comes here to be processed, and goes back out as eco-bricks and building material.

The people running it come from those same villages. They travel in, they learn the machines, and they are paid for the work. That is the part we care most about. The skill stays with the person long after any one batch is finished.

A machine we operate on a good weekend is a project. A facility that runs every week, with trained people on it, is a livelihood.