Design and Fabrication of a Solid Waste Sorting Machine

Abstract

Management of solid waste is essential to our health and environmental protection. Separation of the wastes in order to reduce, re-use, recycle, and recover energy from them or to process them for further use, is key to the proper management of the waste. Minna, the capital city of Niger State, Nigeria is on daily basis experiencing continuous growth which contributes enormously to the generation of different types of solid wastes that are dumped together. In order to sort the solid wastes, a sorting machine was designed and fabricated. The machine was designed with the major components being the fast-moving conveyor, slow moving conveyor, shafts, electric motor and fan. When performance evaluation was carried out on the solid waste sorting machine, it was able to sort 2, 3, 4, 6 kg of municipal solid waste into light fractions of 0.90, 1.30, 1.65, 2.45 kg and heavy fractions of 1.10, 1.70, 2.35, 3.55kg in 109.8, 165,219.6 and 330 seconds respectively. The solid waste sorting machine was also able to sort 3, 4, 5, 6 kg of municipal waste into light fractions of 1.65, 1.85, 2.08, 2.15 kg, ferrous metallic fractions of 0.25, 0.45, 0.95, 1.15 kg and heavy fractions of 1.10, 1.70, 1.97, 2.70kg in 168, 223.5, 287.5, 341.20 seconds respectively. The cost of materials and fabrication of the machine was one hundred and fifty-four thousand, nine hundred and eighty naira (₦154,980.00) only.