From Sola Ojo, Kaduna
In Kaduna State, indiscriminate dumping of solid waste is a growing concern. Plastic bottles and other solid waste are randomly dumped on roads. Residents fear if not checked, it would seriously hurt the society.
Reports say Nigeria generates more than 32 million tons of solid waste annually. These wastes are derived from households and local business ventures that operate in the metropolis.
Only about 20 to 30 per cent of this figure is collected. The remaining 70 per cent is indiscriminately dumped in uncompleted buildings, streets, drains, roadsides and rivers.
A stakeholder, Gloria Kasang Bulus, chief executive officer, of Bridge That Gap, said: “The situation is already alarming. The people need a better location to drop their used plastic bottles and other solid wastes for possible evacuation and recycling. We can make the environment safer for us and other users and this is a government responsibility.
“There is a need for an effective evacuation strategy to deal with the assigned task looking at the volume of waste generated in the state daily.
“We should further look at how to harness the waste generated or evacuated to something that will benefit the population instead of the present state of affairs where they serve as nothing but agents of pollution, floods and outbreaks of diseases.”
She said her company was trying to assist the Federal Government and the Kaduna State Government to mitigate the challenges of climate change through the evacuation of waste and recycling of plastics and metal items.
Manager, Plastic Department, SPC Integrated Recycling Company, Nigeria, Hassan Faisal Suleiman, told Daily Sun: “We are open to everyone and we do encourage people to sort their waste into metal, plastic and even cabbage for agricultural purposes.
“We have boys who go round to buy these materials using scale. They are also paid on arrival though the payment depends on the quality of the materials because there are plastics that are not recyclable for now.
“We sort them into various categories and colours. We crush them to reduce the sizes, wash them to reed them off impurities and then dry to remove the moisture.
“After, they are fed into the recycling machine to produce pallets.
From there, the pallets are transferred into another process entirely where we make clothing, polyester, kettles, plates, spoons, cups, baskets etc.
“We encourage people to get a place to keep their used plastic bottles and get paid instead of dumping them indiscriminately. This means we are helping the country through waste management.
“We collect at least five tons of waste daily and more than that sometimes. A ton is what a single cabin pick-up fan can carry. These are items that would have ordinarily ended up in drains or rivers leading to floods and diseases outbreak.
“Again, we do take apprentices and the government can sponsor people especially youths. Unemployment plays a significant role in the issue of insecurity we are having as a country. This business accommodates both learned and unlearned. We have managers who have never gone to school and they manage huge resources at their disposal very well.”
He, however, lamented the high cost of energy and security threats to the company at its present location: “On power, honestly, both the public electricity and generating sets supplies are challenging. We are running on generating set because there is no public electricity supply.
“Some of these machines need pre-warming of about three hours before they are put to use. Even with that, we use gas to further heat them to enable them to produce good outcomes. One machine consumes about N1million a month and we have three of such machines. But, we are planning to generate our power source.”