The Coca-Cola Foundation of the American soft drink giant is providing the Ivorian town of Bouaké with a plastic waste recycling plant. It will reduce pollution and create 20 direct jobs, particularly for women in the Gbêkë region.
In Ivory Coast, the municipality of Bouaké, located 106 kilometres from the capital Yamoussoukro, will henceforth recycle the plastic waste generated by its 803,000 inhabitants. This will be thanks to a recycling unit financed to the tune of 124.4 million CFA francs (189,000 euros) by the Coca-Cola Foundation. The facility will be managed by Coliba Africa, a plastics processing company based in Abidjan. It will eventually allow the collection and processing of 600 tonnes of plastic bottles in conjunction with four sorting centres installed in containers.
“The bottles and other plastic objects will first go through a machine to be crushed, then washed to be decontaminated of dirt. We will get small particles called flakes that will be reprocessed and re-integrated into other materials in factories. Then we will have semi-finished objects such as shoes,” explains Yaya Koné, the co-founder of the start-up, which will launch in 2020.
According to Mayor Nicolas Djibo, the aim is to improve sanitation and reduce pollution in order to make Ivory Coast’s second city more attractive. In this West African country, the daily production of waste per inhabitant is estimated at 0.64 kilograms by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the German international development cooperation agency.
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Faced with this situation, the Ivorian authorities are multiplying sustainable solutions. It is in this context that the municipality of Bondoukou, located in the Gontougou region, carried out an operation in 2021 to eliminate at least 40 illegal dumps in collaboration with the National Agency for Waste Management (ANAGED). The operation, which was carried out with shovels and collection trucks, enabled the waste to be recycled into fertiliser for agriculture and biogas.
Benoit-Ivan Wansi
