ABSTRACT

It is a common thing in societies today to see plastic materials discarded inappropriately with  consequential effects of degradation of the environment through drainage blockage, emission of human unfriendly gases when combusted by locals amongst other negative impacts. Arising from this it became pertinent to recycle these plastic wastes for the production of new economic materials via processes which include shredding, sorting, controlled melting, moulding, extrusion etc; some of these processes and the relevant machineries for executing them are imported and not easily accessible to many.

This has in turn led to the need to research cheap and local methods of producing the machines using locally sourced materials. In order to achieve this goal, a plastic shredding machine was designed and fabricated. It consists of a loading hopper, shaft with 3 shredding blades at 120° angles apart, sieve, bearings and an electric motor.

Test results obtained from the operational testing of the machine showed that it took an average time of 73.7 minutes for the plastic shredding machine to shred 25 kg of plastic waste. The fabricated plastic shredder had machine throughput capacity of 1170 kg/h. The efficiency of the machine was calculated as 95.7%. The comparative analysis of the results with other research findings showed that it was well within optimum operating capacity and suitable for use in small to medium scale plastic shredding.