Recycling plastic is not easy. 🫣
Spoiler alert: The value of recycled plastic rarely covers the cost of collecting and processing it.
This means plastic waste represents an endless financial burden for communities and countries.
🚚 In more remote areas, transport costs can make recycling unviable.
🏙️ And there’s no market demand outside big cities.
How can we overcome these challenges?
In this webinar, we hear from two very impressive small-scale plastic recyclers on the African coast:
🌞 Alieu Sowe of Plastics Recycling Gambia
🌞 Dipesh Pabari of The FlipFlopi Project in Kenya.
They share their experiences, the ups and downs of their work, and what financial and policy frameworks help – or get in the way.
We also introduce the Flipflopi Toolkit, a practical new resource designed to support plastic recovery in peri-urban, shoreline and remote communities.
This webinar is useful for:
🔅 Community-based organisations
🔅 Local governments
🔅 Small enterprises
🔅 Anyone working to improve plastic recovery and recycling in hard-to-reach areas.
As well as:
✳️ Donors
✳️ Policymakers
✳️ Technical advisors
interested in supporting more viable recycling systems.
Top takeaways for small-scale plastic recycling in resource-constrained environments:
1️⃣ It’s not easy. Believe in yourself. Also manage your expectations. Start small and learn your valuable lessons before trying to scale.
2️⃣ It takes an entire ecosystem to make it work. That means working closely with your local municipality and even national government to build an enabling environment: policy (and importantly: policy implementation), community engagement, and market alignment are all vital pieces of the puzzle.
3️⃣ Plastic recyclers are delivering a public service and need support! Secure land tenure, reasonable rent, a suitable vehicle, a reliable electricity connection… these are things municipalities can help with.
4️⃣ Finance. The value of recycled plastic is barely (if at all) sufficient to keep operations running sustainably. Banks often see recycling enterprises as too high risk. Why? Because in many countries it’s a “young” industry with little track record. Again, governments and municipalities can help by creating and implementing policies that make recycling a promising investment. Note: it needs to be a “patient” investment. Donors please also recognise this – reaching financial sustainability in 2 years is the stuff of dreams. Please have realistic expectations.
5️⃣ Watch your cashflow. You need to make sure you can sell at a higher price than you pay for collection. Your sale price also needs to cover staff costs, rent, fuel, insurance and any capital costs like upgrading machinery.
We hear from Alieu and Dipesh about the personal drive and passion it takes to deliver plastic recycling in their African contexts. These initiatives only work because of the brilliant, resilient people behind them.
Frankly, that’s not sustainable.
If we want plastic recycling to work, we can’t rely on plastic recyclers alone. They also need to sleep.
❓ How can we work together, across countries, institutions and communities, to make plastic recycling financially viable?
Want to dig deeper into how to make plastic recycling work in remote areas?
👉 The FlipFlopi Toolkit: recycling solutions for remote communities. This is such a fantastic and valuable resource. Learn from the deep experience shared by the Flipflopi team on the island archipelago of Lamu in Kenya.