Brick by brick: Humanitarian upcycling builds a better future in Chad

Hunger in Chad is a harsh reality. The 2025 Global Hunger Index ranks it the sixth-hungriest country in the world, with a score of 34.8 — an indicator that is just short of being considered Alarming on the GHI scale. Nearly one third of the population (32%) is undernourished, and 31.5% of children in the country face chronic undernutrition. 

For nearly 20 years, Concern has worked in Chad, with a large focus of our work being food security and nutrition. Since 2017, we’ve worked with the Ministry of Health to reach more Chadians with accessible quality healthcare. Part of that work has focused on the Lake Chad province — an area that hosts many refugees and internally-displaced people, with correspondingly high rates of malnutrition. 

Last year alone, we screened over 50,000 children in the Lake Chad region, treating nearly 6,700 for malnutrition via our Community Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) programme. CMAM has become the standard of care for malnutrition in part because it’s a simple yet effective programme that moved treatment from centralised clinics to the home with a course of ready-to-use therapeutic food best known as Plumpy’Nut. 

Distributed in individually-portioned packets, Plumpy’Nut is shelf-stable and easy to eat, without any preparation required. It’s also fortified with vitamins and minerals that, in 2024 in Lake Chad, led to a cure rate of over 99%, helping children recover from both stunting and wasting.

This is a great story, but it’s not the end of it. RUTF’s effectiveness carries one side effect: the individual portions, which keep the paste from going bad or becoming contaminated, are made from a plastic-aluminium packaging. A course of RUTF generally includes 150 of these packets. If we’re treating over 6,600 cases of malnutrition in a year in one region, those empty packets add up very quickly. Last year, over 1 million packets of RUTF were distributed in Lake Chad. 

At Concern, we look for the most environmentally-efficient and sustainable solutions to the challenges at hand. Sometimes the waste is necessary given the limitations that many families are facing: safe storage space, electricity, and clean water are all at a premium. 

But that doesn’t mean that’s the end of the story, either. 

The idea of a circular economy replaces the standard approach of “take, make, use, dispose” with a model that reuses and recycles raw materials to prolong their life and reduce waste. It’s an idea that’s been around in different guises for some time, but gained new popularity about a decade ago, particularly in the European Union. 

In a way, the circular economy has also been behind many of Concern’s humanitarian solutions, like using the stalks from last year’s crops to cover the ground (a common Climate Smart Agriculture technique), or creating a rainwater harvesting system to power local sanitation and irrigation projects. Cash transfers are also one of our preferred methods for distributing emergency aid where possible, reducing the amount of unnecessary relief supplies brought in, especially in areas where local markets are still functioning.

One challenge with empty RUTF packets is that their mix of materials makes things a bit more complicated. But we had a ready-made partner in Lake Chad: Karö Enterprise is a social enterprise that specialises in recycling and waste management, particularly plastics. They’re a key figure in the country’s growing circular economy movement, and they knew just what to do with thousands of emptied aluminium-plastic packets. 

Karö Enterprise works with a technique called complementary pyrolysis, which separates the aluminium from the rest of the packet materials, meaning what was once unusable can now be sustainably recovered. 

Once cleaned and sorted, the packets can be crushed into tiny fragments, melted, and combined with sand to create paving stones or bricks. Each one is made up of 75% sand and 25% plastics. Much like the nutritional supplement each packet originally contained, these stones also pack a punch and are strong enough to be made into roads or used in construction projects. Karö is able to sell each brick for 500 Chadian francs, or roughly €0.75. 

Concern and Karö ran an initial pilot for these RUTF bricks at the end of 2024, collecting about 59kg of empty Plumpy’Nut wrappers in the first month from health centres and mobile clinics. We also led awareness campaigns in communities who had received courses of RUTF to encourage families to return the empty packaging at home. Together, the team made 600 bricks out of roughly 12,800 packets.

Think of it as a model for humanitarian upcycling: transforming unavoidable waste into valuable local materials. This ensures we’re doing as much as we can to provide immediate relief in the moment without compromising the future. That’s also a key part of our commitment to sustainable solutions. 

“While it was a pilot project, the positive outcomes and reduction in litter show that small changes can make a huge difference,” says Clémence Eberschweiler, Concern Chad Country Director.

For this initial project, Karö kept the bricks produced to use for their commercial purposes (Concern also supported the organisation with marketing, staff training, protection equipment, and techniques to improve processing). However, in perhaps an ultimate humanitarian upcycling move, Eberschweiler adds that future bricks could be used for Concern’s own infrastructure projects — and even parts of Concern Chad’s own offices.

It’s exactly this kind of thinking that guides many of Concern’s integrated programmes, fostering climate resilience through innovation, a community-led recycling initiative, and local partners who are committed to building a better future, brick by brick.