EEP 2021: Recycling Plastic Waste into Building Floor Interlocks (Progress Report)

 Crea8ive Planet Academy is a vocational school operating in Kaduna State Nigeria with the aim of grooming and nurturing students to learn life skills that will help them in the future and also use imagination and critical thinking to create new forms of ideas.   

Our project for ISNAD-Africa‘s Environment Education Programme is to recycle plastic wastes into floor tiles and interlocks. Plastic waste is non-biodegradable and we identified it as a major cause of the most pressing environmental challenges we face in our community. It accounts for the majority of the wastes being dumped in our environment which is really affecting us by blocking our sewage lines and causing erosion.  

We started implementing the project by: 

• Evacuating plastic waste in our environment and nearby communities. We evacuated 137kg plastics from kabala west, 165kg from Ungwan Muazu and 148kg from Nariya. In total, we had 450kg from these areas. 

• Educating our immediate community on environmental education and then we held seminars at other secondary schools educating students on the morality of proper waste management. we went to Nusray international School where we had the audience of about 49 students and to Katari School where we also reached about 73 students.  

• Collecting waste plastics from school students in exchange for study materials.  
• Learning the sorting techniques and varieties of plastics for effective recycling.  

• With support from Mega Recyclers, we were taught how to crush the tough plastics and also allowed the opportunity to crush both LDPE and HDPE plastics at no cost for effective recycling. 

• Fabricated 10 molders for developing the interlocks. 

Our Advisor for the project, Dr Nsikak Abasi Etim “a senior lecturer in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Extension, University of Uyo, Nigeria” has been helpful in the implementation of this project. He has been ensuring we meet up with our order of schedule by providing guidelines, motivation and concept for the accomplishment of the project. He is also engaging us to track our progress through frequent meetings. 

At the moment, we have gathered about 1.2 tonnes of plastic wastes and about to start producing the interlocking blocks out of the plastic waste. The goal is to produce about 440 pieces of 10 square meter interlock blocks and we are excited to continue on this journey.