In Africa’s largest economy and most populous country, waste collection, sorting and recycling is desperately scarce.
But there is also smart news. Some marketers struggle to tackle the mountain of waste, despite the many challenges.
Romco Metals began recycling aluminum at its plant outside Lagos in 2015, attracted by global demand for this lightweight, strong and flexible metal.
Based on its strong results, it has built a momentary plant outside accra, the capital of Ghana, and now plans to open at least 3 new plants in Africa and triple production by 2025.
Aluminum is the most widely used metal at the time in the world after metal and is widely used in automobile construction and manufacturing.
“Electric cars require lighter, more durable fabrics like aluminum, and that’s where our fabrics end up,” said the company’s young founder, Raymond Onovwigun, 32.
Job creation
A UK-registered company, Romco melts and recycles around 1500 tonnes of discarded aluminium per month, out of a total of 3000 tonnes.
It says it has created 450 direct jobs, 5,000 in total, in this labor-intensive sector, and plans to double that number within a year.
“Before (. . . ) there was no work,” Bankole Gbenga, known as Chief Abore, told AFP on a recent stopover at the Lagos plant.
Chief Abore says more than a hundred young people from his netpaintings now paint for Romco to some extent.
“Some do carpentry, some are welders. . . some young people do security,” said the forty. 0.
Among those who have benefited the most from Romco’s activities are curtain suppliers such as Mohammed Ashiru Madugu, who delivers several scrap trucks every week.
Madugu has a warehouse in northwest Katsina, where suppliers from all over the state and even neighboring states bring in the discarded metal.
He loads the goods onto trucks and ships them to Lagos, more than a thousand kilometers (600 miles) away.
For a truck, you can pay up to 26 million naira (about $ 60,000), the price fluctuates.
The steel scrap supplier said they needed escorts because of the threat of ambushes through criminal gangs on the road.
Romco later told AFP that none of his escort suppliers and none had been involved in attacks by criminals.
“We have had cases of something of this kind,” he said in a statement.
big problem
Only a small fraction of waste is recycled in Nigeria, out of some 210 million consumers.
Plastic, steel and glass that are collected and processed in complex economies are most often discarded.
Every year, Nigeria dumps 200,000 pieces of plastic into the Atlantic, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization reported last year.
In Lagos alone, a city of more than 20 million people, less than 10 percent of recyclable fabrics are collected lately, Ibrahim Adejuwon Odumboni, director general of the Lagos State Management Agency, told AFP.
By comparison, in the UK, more than 41% of tea collected through local government was recycled last year, according to UK statistics.
For Odumboni, recycling projects are welcome, but corporations that make aluminum cans and other products do more.
“We want brands to invest in the collection system. In many parts of the world, part of what brands sell is for product recovery. Lately we don’t have that in Nigeria,” he said.
If corporations promoting aluminum products “are found guilty (for waste collection), it doesn’t make sense: we’re going around in circles. “
He blames the bad law, but says a protracted production rights (EPR) law is recently being passed in the National Assembly.
EPR is an environmental policy in place in many countries that encourages manufacturers to assume the duty of its further use.
Another challenge for recyclers is the carbon emissions from the energy they use to crush, shred or age materials.
Romco, for example, uses compressed herbal fuel to convert aluminum into ingots.
“(It’s) still a fossil fuel, but the most productive and most effective fossil fuel. It contains no lead or sulfur,” Onovwigun said.
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