ABSTRACT

 It is common thing in societies today to see plastic materials discarded inappropriately with a consequential effects of degradation of the environment through drainage blockage, emission of human unfriendly gasses when combusted which is a normal practice 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 recycling 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 them using locally sourced materials. In this respect, in the present research a plastic shredding machine was designed and fabricated. It consisted of a loading hopper, shaft with 3 shredding blades at 120o 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 seconds for the plastic shredding machine to shred the given amount of load input of 25kg of plastic waste. The fabricated plastic shredder had machine throughput capacity of 1170kg/hr. 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