Turning Bottle Waste Into Opportunity: A Guinea Recycling Cooperative’s Story
The Plastic Waste Challenge in Conakry
Like many rapidly growing cities across West Africa, Conakry, the capital of Guinea, faces an escalating plastic waste problem. Single-use water bottles, cooking oil jerrycans, detergent containers, and discarded buckets accumulate in neighborhoods with limited waste collection infrastructure.
Coopérative d’Actions Citoyennes — a citizen-led cooperative — decided to turn this problem into a business. Their model: collect post-consumer rigid plastics from the community, sort them by type, crush them into uniform flakes, and supply the output to downstream recyclers. The missing piece was the right crushing equipment.
After researching suppliers, the cooperative reached out to Henan Shuliy Machinery and ordered a plastic bottle crusher machine — the SL-600 model — to serve as the core of their small-scale recycling operation.
What Materials Needed to Be Crushed
The cooperative’s sorting yard receives four main categories of rigid plastic:
| Plastic Type | Common Items Collected |
|---|---|
| ПНД | Jerrycans, chemical containers, detergent bottles |
| ПП | Buckets, basins, crates, food containers |
| ДОМАШНИЙ ПИТОМЕЦ | Water bottles, carbonated drink bottles |
| Mixed | Bottle caps, automotive interior plastics, miscellaneous |
The SL-600: Built for Rigid Plastics
The crushing machine selected for this project is the SL-600, a single-shaft rotary crusher purpose-built for hard plastics. Here is what the cooperative received:
| Параметр | Спецификация |
|---|---|
| Модель | СЛ-600 |
| Motor | 22 kW |
| Throughput | 600–800 kg/h |
| Knife configuration | 10 knives (6 rotating + 4 stationary) |
| Blade steel | 60Si2Mn alloy steel |
| Screen aperture | 15 mm |
| Machine footprint | 1200 × 700 × 1600 mm |
| Power requirement | 380V / 50Hz / 3-phase |