Thursday 11 June 2009

Fantastic recycling programme

Whilst visiting our construction and agriculture sites on Tuesday, I was shown a brilliant recycling project that Bethesda (our partners in Benin) were running, but which has lost funding and so has come to a halt. The City's garbage trucks carried mountains of garbage out into the countryside (below, which has mercifully been recently covered by vegetation)...

...Then the Bethesda guys sorted the mountains of garbage. Metals were sold for their scrap iron content, and plastics were melted and mixed with sand, and poured into molds to make...paving blocks!

What a brilliant idea, and a great way to recycle the billions of plastic bags that are wasted every year in Cotonou. Shame the project couldn't continue. Most of Cotonou's streets are paved with interlocking concrete paving blocks: I think these recycled plastic ones would have been a good alternative. Olly

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