Waste recycling July 2016

According to the Lusaka City Council every day 900 tons of waste are produced in the city. The Council only collects 300 to 400 tons of waste and brings it to the dump site. The rest is buried or burnt on the street and in private yards.

The dump site itself is not equipped for proper waste treatment.

Recycling activities are organized by privates, and facilitated at the dump site.

Dump site Lusaka Chunga

At Mushemi House, the cohabitation where I currently live, we are adopting measures to reduce the amount of waste we produce. Waste separation is not self-evident in a context as Lusaka, and once separated you need to take a further step, to recycle at least part of our waste.

We bring paper to a collection point at the Alliance Française.

Aluminium (mostly cans) can be sold for few Kwachas (local currency, present exchange rate: 1 UDS is about 10 Kwacha)  to small scrap metal enterprises.

Facilitators for recycling are the social enterprises Eco Zambia and Trashback.

Eco Zambia provides information about recycling possibilities in Lusaka, and general advice on ecology and ecological education.

Trashback organizes the cooperation between local communities and recycling companies, as well as systems of materials collection which allow an income for the recyclers.

Thanks to their informations and resources we have extended our recycling network: shopping bags are recycled by Chikumbuso, an association for widows and orphans in the compound of Ng’ombe, in the north of the city. In their recycling workshop they produce fancy bags and baskets woven and knitted out of recycled shopping bags.

Basked made with recycled shopping bags at Chikumbuso.

Further plastics of the recycling groups 1 (PET), 2 (High Density Polyethylene), and 4 (Low Density Polyethylene) are recycled by companies in Lusaka, and can be either delivered to collection points, or collected by the same companies, if in sufficient quantities.

Plastics from waste separation of the last months.

 

  Recyclable plastics:

Group 1 – PET

Group 2 – HDPE

Group 4 – LDPE

 

Non-recyclable plastics

Group 5 – Polypropylene

Group 6 – Polystyrene / Styrofoam.

Group 7 – other plastics (mostly packaging of food from South African supermarket chains, with no indication of plastic group for recycling).

 

Non recyclable plastics, compacted. They could be shredded and used as filling material for shipping.

Finally we can re-purpose 500ml yoghurt containers, juice tetra-packs and packaging of similar size into pots for our tree-nursery in the garden.

Semi finished pots for the tree nursery.