Ele-Collection : Plastic Waste to Building Material

Victoria Falls is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a top tourist destination and one of the world’s most breathtaking natural wonders. The town, however, faces a major environmental challenge that threatens its beauty and biodiversity. Every month, over 200 tonnes of plastic floods into the towns of Victoria Falls and Livingstone through mismanaged waste, much of it generated by the tourist industry. Studies show that over 70% of elephant dung collected at dump sites contains plastic. The plastic being ingested by elephants (and other wildlife) is causing toxicity, internal bleeding, blockages, aggression and often eventual death.

An incident arising out of this problem (see the video above) inspired a trio of locals (Ben Norton, Simon Teede and Rainer Von Urff-Kaufeld) to launch an innovative project to turn plastic waste into a flexible, sturdy building material, while creating income for local communities.

After a great deal of planning and fundraising operations were launched in a factory premises in Victoria Falls in October 2024. Six months ago they took delivery of state-of-the-art machinery for reconstituting plastic, imported from Thailand (which has become a world leader in this type of technology).

Stuart Robertson gave me a tour of the Ele Collection plant in Victoria Falls and was keen to make clear that this process is not just recycling in the sense of melting down plastic bottles to make new bottles. It is a reconstituting process to lock up plastic in a completely different form.

The plant processes 30 tons of plastic per month from Victoria Falls town. Ele Collection at present buys waste materials (plastic or glass) for 10c a kg from seven women who deliver large consignments of waste, sorted into categories (see below), and from members of the public bringing waste materials to the gate of the factory.

As Ben Norton points out, the recycling solution creates economic opportunities for communities. “We struggle to motivate people not to litter and to want to clean up all the trash we’ve created over decades. This can attach value to plastic, which can be paid for per kilogram and result in at least double the minimum wage earnings. It can create a self-motivated widespread community clean-up that draws plastic out of areas and brings income to the people who need it most.”

There is also ongoing collection of waste from the streets of Victoria Falls and from the town’s rubbish dump. Collection teams, assembled from some of the poorest members of the community, benefit, as waste plastic now has a value.

The waste plastic is sorted into three categories:

• Soft plastic (LDPE = Low-density Polyethylene) e.g. packets from bread, flour, mealie meal, etc

• Medium plastic (PET = Polyethylene Terephthalate) e.g. bottles of every sort, water, coke bottles

• Hard plastic (HDPE = High-density Polyethylene) e.g. 5 liter liquid containers, food containers, PVC piping, car parts with plastic components. (This latter usually takes more processing as metal components have to be stripped from the plastic, e.g. in the case of car parts).  

The plastics do not need to be cleaned, because the industrial process accepts a 10% residue of contaminants such as dirt.

 The different types of plastic are put through a machine that heats and crushes the sorted material into manageable blocks of approximately 1 metre square.

The blocks are then put onto conveyors

and dropped into shredding machinery that turns the different grades of plastic into a fine material.

Alongside this processing of plastic waste, glass is crushed in two stages, first of all smashed into chips and then put several times through a pulverizing machine than makes a coarse sand.

The different types of plastic plus the glass sand are then mixed in carefully controlled proportions to achieve the most uniform mixture for the eventual aggregate.

This mixed material is put through an extruder with 24 heater elements that melts the constituents together.

Temperatures are kept at or below 300◦C to reduce the toxins that are an automatic part of the process. (Higher temperatures produce higher levels of toxic gas.) 

A scrubber tank runs the fume-laden air through water to capture as much of the contents of the fumes as possible.

The hot extruded material is sprayed with quarry dust in a trommel to improve its adhesive qualities when it is included in concrete.

As the resultant conglomerate is being extruded, blades chop it into particles of four different sizes – from the size of the first joint of a thumb to a coarse-sand size.

The resultant material is an innovative building aggregate, called Plazrok.

The material is sold to a variety of clients for use in construction projects and products such as:

• Pothole repair (it is being used to good effect along the Kazungula Road) and road resurfacing
• Brick manufacturing
• Addition to concrete in any context where gravel might be used traditionally
• Paving slabs.

The plastic material replacing quarry dust or gravel creates concrete products that are three times stronger and more flexible than the conventional forms of concrete.

By transforming plastic into building aggregate suitable for construction, it is possible to reduce landfill waste, lower the environmental footprint of the construction industry, protect wildlife, and support the development of eco-friendly infrastructure and local industries.

…………………………………..

Once the Victoria Falls cleanup is successfully underway, Ele Collection plans to extend its efforts to tackling plastic pollution across this vast and ecologically significant area of the Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) region, which includes conservation areas in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Angola and Zambia.

……………………………………

SOURCES

• Tour provided by Stuart Robertson
• https://www.tourismupdate.com/article/inspiring-plastic-waste-solution-in-vic-fallsAfrican Bush Camps and African Bush Camps Foundation, 14 August at 16:32 ·
• [VIDEO::https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-XzIL1SsOE]
• https://www.victoriafalls-guide.net/ele-collection.html