DRC: recycle plastic waste to clean up kinshasa<

Like Ms. Bopena, other residents come to sell plastic waste that they carry in bags or other carts.A waste dump as far as the eye can see, spilled by large vehicles, is installed behind the factory.Everything is there: bottles, sachets, chairs, tables, cans, dolls, etc..

In the enclosure, mountains of compacted plastic bottles rub shoulders with other packs of waste already crushed.On the right wing of the factory, an employee handles a crusher, while another works on a compactor and pours out of new plastic plastic bottles there.

"Sustainable solution"

"These are factory waste sent by a manufacturer of the place.We have partnerships with large manufacturers of plastic products.They send us their waste, and we make regenerated material, "explains M.Pandya.

"Our goal is to have a range of 100% recycled products made in Kinshasa," adds AlexanderBamanisa.The crushed and compacted materials are driven in turn on a metal carpet driving up to the cleaning plant.They are then melted and poured into a granular.

Depending on the colors, the materials thus regenerated in the form of grainy are placed in white and stored bags, ready to be sold to the plastic manufacturing industries.

The idea at the origin of the creation of Clean Plast came from the increasing presence of plastic waste in the city, explains M.Bamanisa."It was important for us to help seek a lasting solution to this waste management problem".

In Kinshasa, private initiatives are taken in particular by environmental protection organizations without overcome the phenomenon.In 2008, as part of a project covering 9 municipalities in the capital and having ended in August 2015, the European Union had injected one million dollars a month for the evacuation of household waste.

In October 2019, President Félix Tshisekedi launched "Kin Bopeto" (Kinshasa Clean), an operation against unsanitary conditions in the capital, piloted by the urban authorities.Since then, only a few garbage cans have been installed in certain districts of Kinshasa, where the daily production of waste is estimated at 9.000 tonnes, according to the Marie.

To listen to: our podcast "Return of land"

In the slums of Kinshasa, furiously inventive artists have created extraordinary masks, from the waste that litter the streets.These masks, these "costumes" which cover them entirely, connect them to animist traditions of their ancestors.Today, they divert them and use it as weapons to denounce misery.The photoreporter Stéphan Gladieu shared their daily lives, he returns to his experience in the fourteenth episode of our podcast "Return of the field" to discover below and on all the listening platforms.

Read also :