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Plastic Recycling

Plastic recycling in Ethiopia primarily involves PET and other mixed thermoplastics, with 30-40% of plastic waste being recycled annually. Informal recyclers collect PET bottles, mainly from hotels, but face challenges such as high transportation costs and lack of advanced recycling technology. Despite the potential for growth in the local market, especially in the textile sector, there is currently no bottle-to-bottle recycling or advanced processing methods available.

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Tewabe Gashaw
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18 views1 page

Plastic Recycling

Plastic recycling in Ethiopia primarily involves PET and other mixed thermoplastics, with 30-40% of plastic waste being recycled annually. Informal recyclers collect PET bottles, mainly from hotels, but face challenges such as high transportation costs and lack of advanced recycling technology. Despite the potential for growth in the local market, especially in the textile sector, there is currently no bottle-to-bottle recycling or advanced processing methods available.

Uploaded by

Tewabe Gashaw
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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PLASTIC RECYCLING

Source: https://www.giz.de/en/downloads/GBN_SectorBrief_%C3%84thiopien-
Recyling_E_WEB.pdf

Plastic recycling can be classified into two categories: PET recycling and recycling of other
mixed thermoplastics, mostly polyethylene (PE), polyp ropylene (PP) and Polyvinylchloride
(PVC). Around 30 – 40 % of the plastic wastes are recycled or reused; a total of 60 000 – 65 000
tons per year.

Informal recyclers gather PET-bottles mainly from hotels and gastronomies. General qualities
are good, but occasionally suffer from inappropriate storage in bright sunlight. Most of the
material has a light blue color, due to the previous use as single-use water bottles. Recyclers still
pay prices up to 300 US$/ton and the recycling plants are not subsidized. Currently the estimated
number of PET-recyclers in Ethiopia is around ten. The bottles are mainly recycled into flakes by
a cold wash process, while two recyclers use hot wash processing to obtain flakes of higher
quality. The flakes are not used in the domestic production, but rather exported to generate
foreign currency. This is mainly due to a lack of technology, experience and investment, as well
as the increasing forex crunch. For recycled materials, the access to the new state-owned railway
from the Modjo Dry Port to the sea port of Doraleh in Djibouti is still denied, resulting in high
transportation costs.

To this point there is no bottle-to-bottle recycling, filtered extrusion or electrospinning in


Ethiopia to process the flakes into materials that can be used in the production again.
Considering how fast the textile economy is growing and that 60 water companies in the market
are selling around 3.5 billion bottles of water per year, there is a high potential for recycled
plastic in the local market. The use of recycled material in electrospinning to textile fibers is only
limited by the quality (e.g. chain length) of the flakes.

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