This month I have been noticing new raise in awareness about the possibility of recycling waste materials. Before I explain the specific activities on recycling in Ethiopia, I would like to give a brief introduction on recycling in general.

Recycling is the method of changing waste materials into new materials that can be consumed by society.  It is a far better alternative to disposing waste products than the generally used and common method of piling waste and burning waste which both cause harmful effects on the environment.

The process of recycling has some general steps. Which are: Separating the waste based on material, collecting the separated waste from different households, distinguishing the purpose of the waste, then finally recycling the waste. Ethiopia being a country with not much past activities in recycling, there has been a new and fast movement on raising awareness and establishing different activities.  I will be explaining the activities based on the general steps.

Firstly, on separation of waste there have been many advertisements, including many popular TV channels showing how to separate waste and its purpose. In addition to this, the many associations that go door to door in Addis Ababa collecting waste have started to inform the residents to separate to waste. 

On the second step of the process, there has been a large improvement on the number of associations collection waste from households. The associations normally setup a team of staff to go around a specific district in the capital and collect waste, the major problem for the units was the hard labour driven transporters they used to collect the waste. In recent activities a popular TV network in Ethiopia organized a program where it supported a specific unit and provided them with a modern vehicle that is used to transport waste. Following this, many individuals have started innovative ideas to solve the problem including a technical modification to the cart to enable less labour effort.

Finally the process of recycling the waste, this step is a bit more hard in Ethiopia there aren?t any large factories that recycle the waste to final products. However, as I have seen in recent times there are companies that prepare the waste, especially plastic bottles and reduce the waste to smaller forms to finally export it to foreign countries where it is processed to finally goods.