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The United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), in partnership with the Food and Beverage Recycling Alliance (FBRA), has expanded Nigeria’s plastic waste recovery infrastructure by establishing four recyclables collection centres in Lagos.
The ongoing activities in Lagos are part of environmental efforts to strengthen the country’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) framework and reduce plastic pollution.
The facilities at Okun Ajah, Lakowe, Igando and Ikorodu, which have been operating ahead of their formal launch, are designed to collect, aggregate and channel recyclable materials away from streets, drainage channels and landfills into the recycling value chain.
The initiative is being implemented under a four-year UNIDO project funded by the Government of Japan to promote a plastic circular economy in Nigeria.
The project has also supported the establishment of a collection centre in Abuja, bringing the number of centres supported under the project to five, with four located in Lagos.
Speaking during an inspection of the facilities, the Director, Pollution Control and Environmental Health Department, Federal Ministry of Environment and National Focal Point, Omotunde Adeola, said the initiative would help the government tackle plastic pollution while generating data needed for better policy decisions.
Adeola said the government was particularly interested in the volume of plastics collected and recycled through such initiatives, stressing that reliable data was critical to planning interventions in the sector.
“We cannot manage what we cannot measure,” she said, adding that the government needed to aggregate data from states and operators to determine the quantity of plastic waste being generated and the proportion being recovered.
She said the Federal Government was promoting a “waste-to-wealth” approach and had implemented programmes supporting youth and women in plastic recycling through grants and other interventions.
According to her, the government has supported plastic recycling projects across different states through annual budgets, including facilities and empowerment programmes to help young people and women establish recycling businesses.
Adeola, however, said more needed to be done to create a viable business environment for small and medium-scale operators in the recycling sector.
She identified the low price of recovered plastics as one of the challenges confronting recyclers, saying the government would continue reviewing policies to make recycling businesses more sustainable.
She also called for stronger enforcement of waste segregation at source, saying separating plastics, paper, cans and other materials at household level would improve the quality and value of recyclables.
Adeola said only about 10 per cent of plastic generated in Nigeria is currently being recycled, indicating the scale of opportunity for investment in the sector.
“We need to begin to have that culture, even from our children, that once you use a material, there are different places you can put them into to sort them,” she said.
The Director, Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency (LASEPA), Mrs Adebayo Adedayo, said the state had established policies to promote plastic waste management and was using EPR to encourage producers and users of plastic materials to take responsibility for their recovery and recycling.
She said Lagos was promoting a circular economy and had made EPR mandatory for producers, while stressing the need for increased public awareness and improved waste separation.
Adedayo also said the state was working with informal waste pickers and their associations to integrate them into the formal plastic waste management system.
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This, she said, would enable the state to harness the contribution of informal operators who already play a significant role in recovering recyclable materials from communities.
At Polysmart Group, which operates one of the facilities supported through the initiative, the Group Deputy Managing Director, Mohammad Dubuk, said the company was scaling up its collection network to significantly increase the volume of plastic removed from Nigeria’s environment.
Dubuk said Polysmart currently has the capacity to process about eight billion PET bottles annually, describing the figure as a major contribution to reducing plastic pollution.
He said the company planned to increase its collection centres to 250 across Nigeria within the next one-and-a-half years, with the long-term objective of establishing at least one centre in every local government area.
According to him, the collection centres gather PET waste from communities, bale the materials and send them to recycling facilities where they are processed into raw materials for the production of food-grade products.
He disclosed that the company was investing $60 million in the expansion of its production facilities, with an additional estimated $10 million to $15 million earmarked for the first phase of establishing collection centres across the country.
Dubuk said the environmental benefit of the expansion would extend beyond waste collection, as recycling would reduce the need to produce new plastic from virgin materials.
He estimated that the company’s recycling activities could save carbon emissions equivalent to removing about 50,000 cars from the roads annually, describing the impact as comparable to planting about nine million trees.
Also speaking, UNIDO Field Coordinator, Charles Uzoma, said the collection centres were established as pilot projects to demonstrate that a functional plastic circular economy could work in Nigeria and provide a model that could be scaled up by government and the private sector.
He said UNIDO provided equipment and tricycles for collection, while private-sector partners provided facilities, land and operational support.
Uzoma said the project, funded by the Government of Japan, had brought together the Federal Ministry of Environment, LASEPA, National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency (NESREA), FBRA and private-sector operators.
He said the strategic location of the centres was important because it would make it easier for residents and collectors to channel plastic waste into the recycling system instead of allowing it to enter drainage channels, waterways and the ocean.
Uzoma said the Lakowe facility, for instance, was located close to areas with restaurants, food vendors and other businesses where large quantities of beverage containers are generated, making it possible to intercept plastic waste before it reaches the coastline and marine environment.
He stressed that the success of the initiative would depend on greater participation by households, businesses, government and informal waste collectors.
According to him, households must begin separating recyclable materials from other waste at source to ensure that cleaner and more valuable materials reach collection centres.
He said the initiative was not intended to solve Nigeria’s plastic waste challenge on its own but to provide a proof of concept that could encourage wider investment and replication.
The expansion comes against the backdrop of Nigeria’s growing plastic pollution challenge, with stakeholders insisting that stronger EPR implementation, investment in collection infrastructure, reliable waste data and behavioural change are required to build a sustainable recycling economy.
The stakeholders said expanding collection infrastructure would not only remove plastics from the environment but also create economic opportunities by turning discarded materials into valuable inputs for industry.
