A Study of Setting up a Plastic Waste Recycling Plant in Cameroon

This paper presents an approach to set up a plastic waste recycling plant using non-biodegradable plastic which are harmful to the environment. The objective is to find the appropriate set of equipment that can be used to ensure a profitable investment for any industrial waste recycling company to be set in Cameroon and in Sub-Saharan Africa in general. Once the equipment to be used for the recycling is chosen, it is necessary to design an overall layout of the unit considering the constraints related to the health and safety of employees as well as to the various risks of accidents or fire in the factory. Having performed the previous steps sequentially, a model implementation of the plastic waste recycling plant with a capacity of 1212kg/h of pellet is presented in this work. It includes three plastic waste recycling lines for the PET, the plastic films PP/PE and the rigid plastics HDPE/PP. The determination of the characteristics of the equipment from suppliers allowed us to calculate the apparent power of 1647.66 kVA and then to choose the appropriate transformer of 2000 kVA, followed by the calculation of the total water treatment of the processing plant which will have the capacity of 40 m3. Considering the net present value and payback period, this is a profitable business that potential investors would want to invest on.