Analysis of Plastic Recycling in Uganda.

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Abstract

In Uganda today, there are several waste collection companies, but what do they do with the collected waste? This essay will enlighten the reader about recycling and this will also be and investigation into one of the waste collection companies to see what methods of recycling they use, if they do recycle. And problems they face. The waste collection company may not be able to recycle, so I will investigate the reasons they don’t and if they do plan on heading there soon.

If waste is not recycled in Uganda, this could have some harmful effects to the environment. Currently there are a few projects being started up to raise awareness for recycling. There needs to be more awareness for recycling to make it an important issue to a Ugandan.

The Company being investigated is the Plastic Recycling Industries Uganda Limited, found in one of the municipalities in Kampala called Nakawa. I chose to look at this specific company because it has been one of the successful companies that has successfully gone through with recycling of a material. I will explain the reasons this company doesn’t collect all recyclable materials but just plastic materials. What I am try to prove in this essay is if PRI should push forward into recycling other materials like paper. Both directors of PRI, Mr. Driessen and Mr. Somani will help me answer the few questions I have about their company.

Table of Contents

Introduction:

Advantages of recycling

Disadvantages of recycling

Bibliography;

Introduction:

Recycling is one of this century’s highlights as resources on our planet are perishing and populations growing, we begin to realize that resources on planet today won’t sustain the human race for long. One of the solutions to some of the resources being depilated is to collect and separate materials from waste then reuse like aluminum cans and glass bottles which are recast into new cans and bottles. Also changing the form of materials or processing them into a new product for sale like old tires becoming rubberized road surfacing, steel cans turned in to car parts. This is all known as recycling. Recycling only works with resources that can be used again and again without much degradation of the resource such as; iron ore which is mined and processed and can’t be replaced. However from iron ore we produce iron which can be cast into many forms like car parts. When these cars get old, iron can be extracted from the iron parts to be recast and remanufactured into new metal objects.

Metals aren’t the only materials that are recyclable; one that’s most familiar to most people today is paper. Most recycled paper is a mixture of post-consumer waste, that is already used paper and also pre-consumer waste which unsold newspapers and magazines. Continuous Pre-consumer waste is a huge waste of materials and energy because there is a relentless production of excess product that won’t actually be sold. It would cut down on trees, costs and energy if printing presses everywhere were to produce just as much as the publications would expect to sell.

Plastics are also another category of materials that are recycled. Plastic is basically any chemically produced substance that can be formed into different shapes when heated. In our day to day life this exists in form of cups, furniture, plastic bags, basins and many more other household items. Our main concern right now is plastic pollutants like plastic water bottles, plastic bags, candy wrappers and other forms of plastic that serve a short period of time and become waste material. The buildup of such wastes can result into harmful effects to both human and plant life. Therefore, need for a good disposal and if possible, use of these wastes in their recycled forms. If this is not done and plastic accumulates, it could prove to be a danger to the environment, because it doesn’t decompose. This is dangerous because it results in loss of soil fertility, since it doesn’t permit good circulation of minerals and water in soil. This would greatly hold back farming activities.

Vegetative waste recycling

Today in Uganda, most waste collection companies do not carry out waste management or recycling. But what has happened in Uganda is that a company has decided to come up and only recycle plastics, because plastics are a huge problem. That would be a good start for Uganda at this moment with plastics. Though this shouldn’t be the end of the issue of recycling, papers, rubber, glass and other materials shouldbe considered to cut down on waste around cities in Uganda and also not to waste the materials that could be reused again and again.

Another ...

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Vegetative waste recycling

Another problem Uganda faces, is the vegetative waste. This kind waste include leaves, peelings, coffee husks and other natural wastes the come from plants. The waste coming from plants in most cases in Uganda, its’ not disposed of well and not utilized completely. Some wastes like peels can be collected and used to make animal feeds or even manure other than being thrown away and burnt up

Plastic Recycling Industries Uganda Limited (PRI) is a recycling company in Uganda that collects any forms of plastics for recycling. PRI is located in Nakawa municipality in Kampala the capital of Uganda. PRI now employs 60 persons on permanent contracts and 80- 120 people on temporary contracts. The indirect employment is estimated to reach 800 persons. PRI has convinced most Hotels, hospitals, schools and other public places to collects plastics for PRI to pick up. But there still some other organizations which sell the plastic waste to PRI, not knowing that PRI is doing them a favor of collecting these wastes to keep the city clean. Below the Logo and location of Plastic Recycling Industries Uganda Limited (PRI) is shown.

This is a map of Kampala showing the location of said company “PRI” in Nakawa district and also the municipality in which it is located called Nakawa.

Advantages of recycling

Recycling Limits Waste, which is an obvious advantage of recycling. The more material recycled the less material that will be left to rest in a landfill for hundreds of years. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to throw something when it has the potential to be reused. If an object can become pollution on the side of a road, a landfill or could be made useful again, it seems that the correct decision is clear.

Another benefit of recycling is teaching society concern. Using time to recycle will help sensitize people to be more responsible when it comes to caring about the environment and the world we live in. Instead of reusing and reusing of materials, recycling shows people that there costs to our way of life. This is very important with children because they need to learn that every decision they make in regard to how we treat the earth and its resources, carries an impact on the quality of the earth. We can choose to care about the earth and nurture the planet or we can dump and trash on the earth just as we want without taking into consideration the consequences.

The process of recycling would create jobs to carry it out. The factories that organize to collect and sort the materials, to be sent off to other factories that reuse the materials will need a skilled line of labour force. In this economy today anything that creates jobs is of advantage. Recycling helps slow down the use of natural resources on the planet. The more materials reused, the fewer the natural resources are used.

Recycling helps some people save money. This could include people who don’t care about recycling at all. Since the products that are recycled are used by them and cheaper too. A method of recycling that is cheap is choosing to buy only used items and not new items. Some people make it a lifestyle to purchase only used items like clothing, furniture, cars and other items used at home. It is easy to see how this would result to a reasonable amount of savings.

Disadvantages of recycling

Recycling requires separate factory setups for recycling process, because paper, plastic, glass and metal are different materials that can’t really be mixed up together for the recycling to be successful. This results in more energy consumption and extra cost, for transportation and sorting and cleaning as well as storage expenses. Recycling expenses are also boosted because to collect the recyclable materials from homes it would require a purchase of more dump trucks which would be expensive. And more dump trucks in the community around could become an irritation to people around because they disturb truck flow.

Some recycling process like the recycling of plastics, results in production of some pollutants. The process of recycling plastics requires chemical skews. Also some other materials like, paper come in various grades, from high-quality office paper to low-quality newspaper. During the recycling process, the different types of paper are sometimes combined. This results in of Natural Resources calls "downcycling," which lowers the overall quality of the recycled product and wastes high-quality paper fibers.

Data collected

I carried out a survey with a questionnaire, I created a questionnaire to find out what Ugandans thought about recycling of paper. I carried out the survey at garden City which is a mall in Kampala. I thought that giving the questionnaires out here would be a good representation of what people in Kampala think since people that go to this mall are from all over Kampala. I carried out a survey of about 100 persons. Below is the questionnaire and the results

Question 1: Do you think littering of paper around the community is harmful to environment just as much as plastic?

Question 2: Do you think that if paper was collected separately for recycling instead for waste, it would make a big difference in the environment?

Question 3: If waste collection companies started to collect paper materials would you take the time to separate the paper waste for collection?

What these results have helped me understand? (Comments)

From the results above, in question 1 more than half of the survey, agreed that paper is harmful to the environment. This helps me understand that people find paper irritating to see littered around and also almost harmful as plastic.

In Question 2, far more than half of the surveyed agree with recycling of paper. This is very encouraging to see, this means that people understand that recycling is very helpful and that it makes a difference to the environment.

Question 3 shows that people may understand that recycling is important but are not willing to carry out collection and separation, my understanding from this is that people don’t have time or cannot be bothered to collect such materials. Although they know that the materials are harmful to the environment they still wouldn’t bother themselves to help.

Factors Affecting Uganda’s development in recycling

Recycling of certain materials in Uganda is very much dependent on the individual circumstances of the institution and the recycling contractors.

Funds to help PRI expand are need because expansion of this institution from just plastic to both paper and plastic would be expensive. Capital is a factor that really stands out as the real problem because they also don’t completely collect plastic waste from the whole Kampala. They only have enough resources to recycle what is probably a ¼ of the plastic waste in Kampala, this isn’t much but still makes a difference.

The first factor that affects the development of recycling in Uganda is the collection method used by Plastic recycling Industries Uganda limited (PRI). This company uses waste collection Lorries to get the plastic materials from the areas around the city of Kampala

This is a picture of one of the Lorries used to collect the plastics around Kampala.

The use of this method of collection by use of Lorries may not completely exhaust the collection of the recyclable materials around the city of Kampala. It is not completely reaching its potential because PRI can afford but a few lorries to do the pick runs around the city. The Use of lorries is very expensive that’s why there a few of them. But this method so far has been most effective in means of collection of such materials around the city.

The other problem faced by PRI is space for collection and storage of recyclables. When the materials are brought in, they are not immediately recycled; they are stored and kept till they are recycled completely in a factory.

This is part of a the plastics collected for recycling, as shown in the diagram there is no space left for other materials because these are already stored here and they alone are a lot. Adding another material like paper would make it very difficult to organize and take up a lot of space making PRI having to buy more space and equipment just for the other type of material.

Size of institution and volume of recyclable material, as I said before expansion will be needed if PRI does intend to push on to recycling paper. Even with the plastic alone the space in the facility is not big enough, so if paper was added there wouldn’t be any space left. So this problem goes back to capital needs. With money PRI would be able to expand its facility and then they can look at recycling other materials or recycling even more recycling more plastic.

Solutions

I think that most of the factors I listed above are solved by having more capital. PRI should consider asking the Uganda government for help for expansion. If PRI gets the funds needed for its expansion, then only then can they consider moving on to recycling paper other than plastics alone.

If PRI fails to get the funds from Ugandan government required for expansion. They should find other methods of collecting capital for expansion like having fund raisers. They could also consider taking a loan from a bank to expand their company. Basically the only factor that is holding PRI back is the capital factor. Money is the only way they can solve their expansion problem.

Conclusion

This analysis of PRI has showed me that recycling isn’t as simple as collecting a few plastic bottles, its way more. There are factors to consider like capital, willingness of people to carry out the collection process. In Uganda many people may find it time wasting to separate their waste, just so that materials are recycled. I hope that in future more people in Uganda get to see the bigger picture and help with recycling.

PRI can expand but not today because of their financial status and the number of people that would help with recycling isn’t big enough to make them decide to expand. PRI will expand in future to come but today it doesn’t sound realistic for them to take money into expansion of the company. They also may not expand to recycling of paper because the plastic they collect is still a bigger problem than the paper waste. The only way recycling of paper can be carried out, through another company that will do the same as PRI and only specialize in paper recycling. That would be the only way for recycling of paper in Kampala to be effective.

Bibliography;

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I, World War. "Recycling." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 2 Oct. 2011. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling>.
"Patrizia Sterenberg Salinas · Plastic Recycling Industries Uganda Ltd. (PRI)." Patrizia Sterenberg Salinas. Web. 10 Oct. 2011. <http://www.sterenbergsalinas.nl/2005/12/plastic-recycling-industries-uganda-ltd-pri/>.
"What Are The Advantages of Recycling?" Knowledge Galaxy - Information For Your Everyday Life. Web. 5 Oct. 2011. <http://www.knowledgegalaxy.net/advantages_of_recycling/advantages_of_recycling.html>.