The city of Gulu, Uganda, is six hours from the nearest recycling plant—so most plastic bottles collected in that city end up trashed or burned. But in a small pilot facility that’s now operating behind a restaurant in the city’s downtown, a startup called Takataka Plastics is testing a new process to turn plastic waste into something valuable.
The team, led by a PhD student in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, created small machines that sort, shred, and melt the plastic so that it can be remade into construction materials and, most recently, reusable, locally made plastic face shields for medical workers who are fighting COVID-19.
“We’ve designed and built unique equipment for recycling plastic waste because locally built machines are cheaper and easier to maintain and fix if they break,” says founder Paige Balcom. “We based our machines on open-source designs but modified them to use locally available parts and fabrication techniques. If an imported machine breaks, often it cannot be repaired—it’s added to the scrap pile and you’re stuck. We still have to import the electronics, but our locally built machines are also easy to replicate, so we can build many machines less expensively and scale to other parts of Uganda and East Africa.”
The scale of the challenge is large: Each day, Uganda generates around 600 metric tons of plastic waste. “In Gulu, where we work, 80% of the plastic waste is not collected,” Balcom says. “Instead, most of the plastic is burned, which releases lethal carcinogens and toxins and CO2, or it’s littered anyhow and ends up blocking drains, causing flooding and breeding grounds for malaria-bearing mosquitoes, or it gets into soil and disrupts crops or is ingested by cows.”