OUR STORY
Our History
Since 2012, CEO Jamiel Hampton and Kiyoshi Nakajima’s common passion for sustainability and environmental stewardship lead to the creation of NAKA Industries.
Our Story
The vision for NAKA Industries (NAKA) began to take shape in the summer 2012 when CEO Jamiel Hampton was attending Morehouse College, and interning at the Southface Institute in Atlanta GA. With 10+ years of management and leadership experience, and support from family and friends, Jamiel applied his expertise as a licensed General Contractor, to re-purposing items in the building construction trade, that support LEED certification, where his search for innovative building material and sustainable energy technologies (solar, geo-thermal, co-generation, etc.) brought him across a YouTube video of Kiyoshi Nakajima’s plastics to oil (PTO) machines in his research. After watching the video he was immediately motivated by the potential in the emerging technology field of Pyrolysis, and he began to research the topic.
Excited by the potential and opportunity, Jamiel started researching various technologies over a year long period, and determined that Nakajima-san had the most efficient (in reference to conversion ratio, electrical consumption, scalable design, waste produced and the quality of oil) systems in the world. Over that year-long period, Jamiel and Nakajima-san continued communicating via email, and once he was sure that he had found the best systems, Nakajima-san invited him to Japan to meet in person, see the machines in action and tour his manufacturing facility.
“I was already sold on the general concept of PTO by the time that I went to Japan, but when I met Nakajima-san in person and got to see the systems in action it was an immediate eureka moment for me!”
Jamiel Hampton - CEO and Founder
Nakajima-san’s motivation for getting involved with PTO technology was started years before he began designing and building the systems. Prior to joining NAKA, Nakajima spent seven years as the co-founder of Blest Japan where he invented and perfected their pyrolysis technology. Through Blest his technology was manufactured and sold throughout several markets around the world. Before Blest, Nakajima retired from Maruha Corporation Japan where he held positions as an Executive Cooperate Officer, a Navigation Officer and a Designer/Engineer for their large fishing vessels.
During his tenure in this position, Nakajima-san was extremely troubled by the amount of plastic waste that he saw in the oceans, fish, and nets. As an avid and lifelong scuba diver, the ocean was a place of escape and a source of peace for him. Over the years he noticed that while diving he was coming into contact with more and more unsettling amounts of plastic waste, from every day single use plastics to giant ghost nets that killed marine life and damaged the fragile eco-systems of his beloved playground. Upon leaving his post on the fishing vessels he turned his knowledge and expertise towards addressing the problem that most concerned him…plastic waste!
In co-founding NAKA with Jamiel, Nakajima-san will help the world move beyond traditional recycling, to the much needed arena of Advanced Recycling! While recycling simply re-purposes plastic (turning old bottles into new bottles), Advanced Recycling converts plastic waste back into individual monomers—allowing materials to be reused in a variety of ways.