Inside Africa's $16 Billion Waste Economy

What happens to this bottle when you finish drinking? That depends entirely on where you are. Drive through cities like Lagos or Mombasa and you'll see this everywhere. 540 million tons of waste goes uncollected every year. Just sitting there, in the streets, the sewage, in the waterways. Not because solutions don't exist. Thousands of people are already collecting this waste informally. Feeding into the recycling supply chain. These basically are raw materials for production. In Nigeria, a company called Scrapaze is paying people to collect it. In Kenya, plastic is turning the same plastic waste into cooking gas. It's a $16 billion opportunity in sub-Saharan Africa alone. But much of the infrastructure is still missing. What would it actually take to build it at scale? Around the eve of my 12-year-old birthday, the death of, I think, a nine-month-old daughter of a neighbor. Because of flooding, the waterways were blocked. Waste-induced flooding. The picture remains with me forever. In Lagos, Nigeria's largest city, there's a visible waste problem. And in the rainy season, it causes flooding. But for Boluwatife Orewa, something didn't add up. During that period also, we have these informal guys very close to our house in my dad's workshop collect recyclables. And you could see that these people are living from hand to mouth. So for me, it was more or less like a paradox. People are trying to get off this waste that blocks, you know, the waterways. And this same waste led to the death of a very young person. So I couldn't make sense of it as of then. The paradox is that the waste that ends up in our waterways and that causes catastrophic flooding is also worth money. Plastic, metal, paper. Manufacturers will pay for it. And there are people out there collecting it. So why does the waste keep piling up? Comprehensive municipal systems — water, sewage, waste management — don't exist at scale across Africa. And the staggering rate of urbanization in Africa is compounding the problem. In the past 50 years, Lagos has grown from a city of around 1 million people to over 17 million today. As African cities grow, the rate of infrastructure development hasn't kept up. Today, 19 of the world's largest dump sites are in sub-Saharan Africa. In Western Europe and North America, 99% of waste gets collected. In sub-Saharan Africa, it's just 37%. And in low-income neighborhoods and informal settlements, it's even worse. Waste management is usually led by the public sector. But in many major cities across Africa, waste systems were never designed to serve today's scale. Uneven urban planning, weak enforcement, and limited investments have left large gaps in collection and recycling. Those gaps are often filled by private companies and informal waste pickers. These enterprises don't replace public waste systems. They strengthen and connect parts of them, making it more scalable and investable. Lagos alone, on a daily basis, generates over 10,000 tons of plastic waste. If you zoom out that into yearly across Nigeria, that's over 500 million tons. If you look at the entire opportunity that's locked within the ecosystem, you are talking upwards of about 16 billion, right across the sub-Saharan African market. Oluwatife is the co-founder and CEO of Scrappiz, a waste management company building a system for waste collection and monetization in West Africa. At Scrappiz, we build digital infrastructure for the recycling value chain. We empower people to use the space in their garage, in their compound, or a shop along their streets to run their own, you know, mini recycling business. As of today, we have over 12,000 registered agents. For an average offtake, we've seen that they end between $300 to $700. Here's how it works. You've collected recyclables, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, scrap metal. You bring them to the nearest Scrappiz agent. That could be someone running a collection point from their garage or a corner shop. They weigh your material on a smart scale connected to a phone. You see the weight, you see the price, and you get paid instantly. My name is Babatunde Omoto-Shaw. I am a Scrappiz agent. I work in Agboyi, K2, Agassiz. I decided to become a Scrappiz agent because I see it as a lucrative business and I've been seeing a lot of scraps all around, you know, at the drainage, you know, everywhere. Something I can assemble and sell to Scrappiz. I collect between 10 kg to 20 kg plastic per day. My typical margin for plastic is between 200 to 300 Naira per kg. With a system like Scrappiz, these people can then have access to credits, right? Because on our end, we have access to both inventory record over a period of time, access to a transaction record over a period of time, and on the back end, we can build some sort of credit scoring for these people that will pass on to our partners, who can then allow them to keep on growing their business. And across the continent in Kenya, near the coastal city of Mombasa, another entrepreneur is addressing this problem further up the value chain. We see a lot of fish being brought in with plastics in their stomachs. I think I've seen images of turtles being strangled by fishing nets, beaches being very badly destroyed by plastic waste. Mombasa produces around 45 tons of waste a day. In a coastal city like Mombasa, plastic waste often ends up in the ocean or in dump sites and is burned. And at the same time, millions of families across the continent are cooking with firewood and charcoal. And dirty cooking smoke is one of the largest causes of death across sub-Saharan Africa. So ideally, we are solving two problems at the same time. Meet Robin Keryuki, the co-founder and CEO of Plastek, a business turning plastic waste into cooking gas. We source primarily from local garbage collectors, youth groups, and more recently started working with aggregators. They range between 25 Kenya shillings per kilo to 35 Kenya shillings per kg, depending on the type of plastics. Once the materials are brought to our site, we clean them, manually shred them, and then we feed them into our reactor. We use a pyrolysis-based process. Pyrolysis is heavily used to produce fuel, diesel, kerosene, and heavy oil. But we modified the reaction to a point where it produces gas because we found that, again, what is more needed by the community we want to serve? It's gas, not fuel. But to scale its business and to become a larger off-taker of plastic waste, Plastek has to address the affordability challenges for its consumers as well. The biggest issue with using gas is that there's a very high cost of transitioning from firewood to gas or from charcoal to gas that locks many of the households out. We are calling it clean cooking as a service. So instead of paying for the cylinder, the burner, and the required stand, we give you the cylinder for free. We give you the burner for free. We also give you the aluminum stand for free. And then you only pay for the gas you use and a small security deposit. If you're buying a bag of charcoal, When refilling gas with our clean cooking as a service model, you pay 1,200 Kenyan shillings. So you save between 300 to 600 Kenyan shillings. When we transition now to our own gas, so six kgs will translate to 900 shillings. That will save you even more. When I started, I used to cook with charcoal. I stopped cooking with charcoal because of the fire. It's difficult to cook with charcoal. If I can't buy charcoal, I buy a lot of money. I only buy a small amount of charcoal. When I buy gas, I finish it in a month. The money is small, but I have a lot of money. I've been doing this plastic work for a year. I've been doing this for a year. But how can businesses like Scrapaze and Plastek address this problem at greater scale? You know, when we talk about climate tech or recycling or what have you, people think of it as a charity first. I like to, you know, make it very clear that if you look at the business case within recycling itself, it's a multi-billion, you know, opportunity. Yes, it might not be as, you know, the VC model, especially from Silicon Valley, will expand within five years. Especially within the African ecosystem, it can be 10. But it's to say the possibility of value capture that is within the African ecosystem is so large. Yet, despite the opportunity and demand for recycled raw materials, funding in the space remains low. According to venture capital fundraising data tracked by Africa The Big Deal, only 54 different waste management companies have cumulatively raised $187 million of funding since 2019, less than 1% of total funding on the continent. The biggest constraint we are facing currently is number one, capital. Recycling is very capital intensive. You need a lot of land, very heavy machinery. You need a lot of expertise. And the biggest will be the regulatory environment. It is not as friendly to startups as we'd like it to be. There's not a lot of room for innovation within the current regulatory environment in Kenya. In 2017, Kenya introduced a ban on plastic bags. Nigeria implemented a nationwide plastic ban bag in 2019. And Lagos State banned single-use plastics in 2024. But enforcement remains unequal. There are also extended producer responsibility, or EPR, policies being implemented. Under these policies, the companies that produce packaging are compelled to pay for the collecting and recycling. The EPR framework is good. I think, again, in order to help reduce plastic pollution, we need a multisectoral approach. If plastics were made easy to recycle from when they were being produced, it will make it easier for us to even do our work. Nigeria has an extended producer responsibility framework. To be fair with you, it's very innocent. And I think enforcement is not as strong. The associations like FIBRA are doing great. And I think they are also pushing some stronger moves that we expect to come in the coming months. Because definitely that ensures that things are much more easier for innovators and everyone involved in the ecosystem. But with the right combination of capital and regulation, these entrepreneurs know what kind of future they want to build. For us, it's very simple. It's for us to 10x recycling rates. And our goal also is to have within five to six kilometers or less our agents, you know, collecting recyclables there. Because for us, our model is a decentralized collection model, which means that individuals are not only empowered, they become advocates. We envision building a small system that can be replicated and deployed across different regions, different communities, training youth groups on how to use these machines. The plastics generated by one community can be dealt with within that community itself. And the households in that community benefit from the plastics generated within that community itself. So the plastics never really leave the community. That's our overarching vision. And for those visions to be realized, more capital is needed across the funding value chain to scale. More and better enforced regulation can help too. These models don't solve the continent's waste problems on their own, but they show what becomes possible when public systems, markets, informal labor, and capital start to connect. Climate tech, recycling, the commercials of it is super strong and solid, right? Waste will always be generated and raw materials will also be needed. And those materials are sourced from, you know, So what happens to this bottle? Right now in Lagos, it could end up in three places. In a gutter, eventually in the ocean, locking drains until the rain comes. That's option one. Or it's picked up, weighed on a scrap-based scale, generating instant income for the waste picker. And that plastic goes to a manufacturer who needs it. Or it gets collected in Mombasa, processed by Plastec, becomes the cooking gas used to make breakfast without smoke. There's $16 billion still sitting in the streets of sub-Saharan Africa. The question is, how much longer are we willing to leave it there?