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Senegal: Back in Dakar After Three Years Around the World
Exactly three years after its first stopover in Dakar, Plastic Odyssey is back symbolically bringing its round-the-world expedition full circle. It was also during this 2023 stopover that the Sunu Plastic Odyssey project was launched. Since then, it has helped develop a sustainable recycling sector in Senegal. This stopover, lasting just over a month, gave the local team and its partners the opportunity to reunite on board the Plastic Odyssey vessel.
32nd edition of the OnBoard Laboratory – Dakar, February 2026
For this OnBoard Laboratory session, the incubation programme was not open to public applications: only partners and entrepreneurs already supported by the local team were invited. The programme combined talks, live demonstrations and hands-on workshops, creating space to share the experience gathered throughout the expedition’s international stopovers.
Presentation of entrepreneurs and initiatives
Yakhia Ndiaye & Djamil Kane – Sonaged
Yakhia Ndiaye and Djamil Kane represent Sonaged, Senegal’s main waste management authority, with more than 16,000 staff members. Yakhia serves as the focal point for waste collection at the port, where he introduced the first source-separation system to sort plastic, cardboard and aluminium. The plastics are then recovered and processed with support from Plastic Odyssey.
Djamil Kane, a technical assistant within the Directorate for Eco-Citizenship Promotion, focuses more specifically on awareness-raising and education. Together, they combine operational waste management with citizen engagement to improve both the efficiency and the environmental impact of collection.
Saliou Kanté – Kante & Frères
Originally from Kédougou, Saliou Kanté founded Kante & Frères in 2008 to organise waste collection in this remote region. He started modestly, using a simple horse-drawn cart, before gradually modernising operations with a tricycle and later a tractor. Today, the company provides household collection services to more than 500 subscribers.
Faced with the limitations of local dumpsites and the arrival of competing public services, Saliou tested several recovery solutions, including small-scale pyrolysis and the production of paving blocks, though these trials did not prove conclusive.
With support from Endeavor Mining, he installed a Plastic Odyssey micro-factory at the end of 2025. Equipped with a shredder and a baler, it enables waste to be densified before being transported to Dakar. The current team includes four people for sorting, two for shredding, seven women for washing, and nine people in total for collection.
Arona Camara – Kuréel des entrepreneurs Mourides
Arona Camara is the president of Kuréel des entrepreneurs Mourides, an association co-founded to support young local entrepreneurs. The organisation notably runs major events such as the Magar fair, where nearly 150 entrepreneurs can showcase their projects and innovations.
Kuréel also operates much like an incubator: it identifies, funds and trains young entrepreneurs, supporting them as they launch their initiatives. Arona, who leads development and specialises in the social economy, plays a central role in training and mentoring this new generation.
Kuréel’s flagship project currently under development is the launch of a recycling micro-factory in Touba, designed to process the waste generated each month during religious ceremonies. For Arona and his team, this waste stands in contradiction to the spirit of a place of worship and the micro-factory offers a concrete solution to reconcile tradition with environmental responsibility.
The initiative already has key operational partners in place, and the association is now seeking financial partners to make the project a reality. The partnership with Plastic Odyssey aims to bring a recycling facility into operation as quickly as possible.
Arona Niass – Association Bokk Diom de Mbeubeuss
As president of the Bokk Diom Association of Mbeubeuss, founded in 1993, Arona Niass represents the waste pickers working at the Mbeubeuss landfill, one of the largest disposal sites in Senegal. Every day, nearly 3,000 people work there collecting and sorting waste, forming an essential, yet often precarious, link in the informal recycling chain. For over thirty years, the association has worked to defend their interests, improve working conditions, and strengthen their collective organisation.
Alongside him, Abdoulaye Endour represents the Bokk Diom cooperative, created in 2022 to complement the association’s work. The cooperative was founded with a clear goal: to stabilise working conditions and purchase prices for collected materials by bringing waste pickers together within a stronger collective structure, better able to negotiate with intermediaries. Today, the cooperative’s activities focus primarily on the recovery of copper, a strategic material whose resale provides a key source of income for collectors.
As part of their drive to professionalise and build skills, their ambition is now to install a micro-factory directly on the site, in partnership with Sunu Plastic Odyssey. This unit would make it possible to process collected plastics locally, increase their added value, and create new economic opportunities for landfill workers.
Beyond the industrial equipment itself, the project also aims to further structure the sector, strengthen the technical skills of collectors, and sustainably improve their incomes. One more step towards recognising an occupation that is essential to Senegal’s circular economy.
Boubacar Diakité – Banco
Based in Saint-Louis, around 300 km north of Dakar, Boubacar Diakité is an entrepreneur committed to building a local plastic recycling value chain. He was already working alongside Plastic Odyssey three years ago and took part in the OnBoard Laboratory as a representative of the Defarat project, where he first began exploring opportunities in waste recovery.
His participation in the OnBoard Lab proved to be a major turning point. Following the programme, he succeeded in securing funding to bring his ambition to life: establishing a full recycling facility in Saint-Louis. Within this framework, he partnered with Sunu Plastic Odyssey, which delivered a containerised micro-factory to Gandon, in the Saint-Louis region.
The facility was officially launched on 13 February 2025, when training began for Banco’s teams, exactly one year ago. Before operations started in Gandon, the teams completed two to three weeks of training in Dakar at Sunu Plastic Odyssey’s main facility. This phase provided the technical skills required: plastic sorting, shredding, washing, extrusion, machine maintenance and production organisation.
Today, Banco’s recycling unit can shred, wash and extrude locally collected plastic. It runs partly on solar energy, improving its energy autonomy, and produces around 16 tonnes of shredded plastic per month, which is then transported to Dakar for further processing.
The project delivers a tangible economic impact: around ten direct jobs at the facility, and between 20 and 30 indirect jobs linked to collection. Beyond the numbers, it is helping build a sustainable sector in Saint-Louis, professionalise local actors, and turn a major environmental challenge into economic opportunity. Banco is also gradually developing a range of furniture made from recycled plastic, working with local carpenters who handle the manufacturing as subcontractors. Progress is gradual, as the market is still emerging, but the teams now have a strong command of the extrusion line and are ready to scale up production of plastic lumber as soon as local demand grows.
Babacar Ndiaye – Afa Nature PastAfrica
Based in Kidira, on the Malian border, Afa Nature PastAfrica is a Franco-Senegalese association committed to collecting and recycling plastic waste. The organisation also works to raise awareness among local communities about sustainable plastic management.
A recycling micro-factory was inaugurated on 22 October 2025, in partnership with Sunu Plastic Odyssey. It enables collected waste to be shredded and compacted before being transported to Dakar, while also helping structure source collection by mobilising residents and local collectors.
The facility currently employs four people, with the objective of reaching around ten direct jobs and creating opportunities for roughly twenty collectors. In the long term, the site aims to recycle several hundred tonnes of plastic per year, while expanding awareness initiatives among young people and communities on the environmental challenges linked to plastic.
Souleymane Ciss & Toumany Mané – Sunu Plastic Odyssey
Souleymane Ciss, a social engineer, and Toumany Mané, a production line operator, represent the local Sunu Plastic Odyssey team. Their participation in the stopover was an opportunity to discover the vessel and explore the different projects the onboard team encountered around the world.
Having joined the initiative more than two years ago, this moment was particularly meaningful for them. It created space to reunite, share progress from local partner projects, and integrate international best practices to further strengthen Sunu Plastic Odyssey’s impact in Senegal.
These three days of exchanges on board concluded with a visit to the Sunu Plastic Odyssey workshop, located just a few hundred metres from the port.
A training day with the École Polytechnique de Thiès
After three days of exchanges with the projects supported by Plastic Odyssey in Senegal, we organised a special training day by welcoming a cohort from the École Polytechnique de Thiès (EPT). The visit took place as part of the FabLab, newly inaugurated on 13 December 2025: a space dedicated to innovation, prototyping and hands-on projects.
The group included:
- THIAM Mouhamadou – Lecturer-researcher
- MBAYE Mame Faty – Lecturer-researcher
- DIAO Ousseynou – Lecturer-researcher
- SARR Omar Ngala – Lecturer-researcher
- SAGNA Gilbert – Laboratory technician
- CISSÉ Abdou – Laboratory technician
- GUEYE Mangone – Engineering student (DIC3 Industrial Engineering)
- DJITÉ Mouhamed – Engineering student (DIC3 Industrial Engineering)
- DIAGNE Moustapha – Engineering student (DIC3 Industrial Engineering)
- NIANG Papa Leyti – Engineering student (DIC3 Industrial Engineering)
- MBACKÉ Serigne Cheikh – Engineering student (DIC3 Industrial Engineering)
- WADE Youssoupha – Engineering student (DIC3 Industrial Engineering)
Professor SARR Omar Ngala, who oversees the integration of the micro-factory into the curriculum, wanted to use this day to introduce his students to plastic woodworking and give them a practical, hands-on experience.
After a visit of the vessel to discover recycling techniques, the group was divided into two teams. Each team was tasked with designing waste bins using recycled plastic lumber, then assembling them in our workshop.
The day helped bridge theory and practice, raised awareness among future engineers about recycling and the circular economy, and offered a concrete demonstration of how plastic can be transformed into useful objects.
OnBoard Laboratory, our incubation program for recycling entrepreneurs
At each stopover on the expedition, the Plastic Odyssey vessel welcomes on board several local recycling entrepreneurs to exchange ideas and develop concrete solutions to combat plastic pollution.