Inside Africa's $16 Billion Waste Economy

Justin Norman: What happens to this bottle when you've finished 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…. 

Babatunde Omotosho: I collect 20kg per day. 

Justin Norman: …feeding into the recycling the supply chain. 

Boluwatife Arewa: This is basically our raw materials for production.

Justin Norman: In Nigeria, a company called Scrapays is paying people to collect it. In Kenya, Plas-tech is turning the same plastic 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?

Boluwatife Arewa: Around the eve of my 12th birthday. The death of a nine-month-old daughter of a neighbor. Because of flooding. The waterways were blocked. Waste-induced flooding. That picture remains with me forever.

Justin Norman: In Lagos, Nigeria's largest city, there is a visible waste problem. And in the rainy season, it causes flooding. But for Boluwatife Arewa, something didn't add up.

Boluwatife Arewa: We had these informal guys close to our house, collecting recyclables. You could see they were living from hand to mouth. It was a paradox. People trying to get rid of the waste that blocks waterways and this same waste led to the death of a young person. I couldn't make sense of it.

Justin Norman: The paradox is that the waste that ends up in our waterways and that causes floods 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 15 million today. As African cities grow, the rate of infrastructure development hasn't kept up. Today, 19 of the world's largest dumpsites are in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Western Europe and North America, 99% of waste gets collected. In Sub-Saharan Africa, it's 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.

Boluwatife Arewa: Lagos alone generates over 10,000 tons of plastic waste on a daily basis. Zoom out to Nigeria yearly, over 500 million tons. If you look at the entire opportunity that's locked within that ecosystem. You are talking upwards of about 16 billion right across the Sub-Saharan African markets.

Justin Norman: Boluwatife is the Co-founder and CEO of Scrapays, a waste management company building a system for waste collection and monetization in West Africa.

Boluwatife Arewa: At Scrapays, 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 mini recycling business. As of today, we have about 12,000 registered agents, of course at different activity levels, different volumes of collection. For an average offtake, we've seen that they earn between $300 to $700.

Justin Norman: Here's how it works. You've collected recyclables—plastic bottles, aluminum cans, scrap metal. You bring them to the nearest Scrapays 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.

Babatunde Omotosho: My name is Babatunde Omotosho, I am a Scrapays agent. I work in Agboyi-Ketu Axis. I decided to become a Scrapays agent because I see it as a lucrative business. I've been seeing a lot of scraps all around… at the drainage, everywhere. Something I can assemble and sell. I collect between 10 to 20 kg of plastic per day. My typical margin is between 200 to 300 Naira per kg.

Boluwatife Arewa: With a system like Scrapays, these people will then have access to credit. Because on our end, we have access to both inventory record over a period of time, access to their transaction record over a period of time, and on the back end, we can build credit scoring for these people that we pass on to our partners, who can then allow them to keep growing their business.  

Justin Norman: Across the continent in Kenya, near the coastal city of Mombasa, another entrepreneur is addressing the problem further along the value chain.

Robin Kariuki: We see a lot of fish being brought in with plastics in their stomachs. We've seen turtles being strangled by fishing nets. Beaches being very badly destroyed by plastic waste. Mombasa produces around 45 tons of waste a day. 

Justin Norman: In a coastal city like Mombasa, plastic waste ends up in the ocean or in dumpsites and is burned. And at the same time, millions of families are cooking with firewood and charcoal, and dirty cooking smoke is one of the largest causes of death across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Robi Kariuki: So ideally, I'm solving two problems at the same time.

Justin Norman: Meet Robin Kariuki, the Co-founder and CEO of Plas-Tech, a business turning plastic waste into cooking gas. 

Robin Kariuki: We source primarily from local garbage collectors, youth groups, and more recently aggregators. They range between 25 Kenya shillings per kilo to 35 Kenya shillings per kg, depending on the type of plastic. Once the materials are brought to our site, we clean them manually, shred them, then feed them into our reactor. We use a pyrolysis-based process. Pyrolysis is heavily used to produce fuels - diesel, kerosene, and heavy oil, but we modified the reaction to produce gas. Because what is more needed by the community? Gas, not fuel.

Justin Norman: But to scale its business, and to become a larger offtaker of plastic waste, Plas-tech has to address the affordability challenges for its consumers, as well.

Robin Kariuki: 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 households out. We call 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.

With charcoal, you're spending around 1,700 to 1,800 Kenya shillings for a bag. When refilling with our clean cooking as a service, they pay 1,200 Kenya shillings. You save between 300 to 600 Kenya shillings. When we transition to our own gas, six kgs will translate to 900 shillings. That will save you even more.

Mialim: Nimemaliza kama miezi sita natumia hii gas. Na inasaidia. Huwa ni rahisi kupika. Kwanza nilikuwa napika na kuni. Nikaacha kupika na kuni juu ya moshi pia. Macho yangu yana shida.

Nilikuwa natumia pesa nyingi. Mia nanunua kuni kidogo. Nikinunua gas, huwa namaliza mwezi. Pesa yake ni kidogo. Kuni ina pesa mingi sana.

Hii kazi za plastic nimeifanya mwaka moja. Natafta plastic kwenye sokoni, maduka and humu njiani njiani. Naokota naleta hapa. Plastic huwa zanipea pesa na mazingira ziwe safi.

I have been using this gas for about six months. And it helps me. It makes cooking easy. Before, I used to cook with firewood. I stopped cooking with firewood because of the smoke as well. My eyes have problems.

I used to spend a lot of money. For a hundred [shillings], I would buy very little firewood. When I buy gas, it usually lasts me a month. The cost is low. Firewood is very expensive.

I have done this work for the past 1 year. I collect plastic from the markets, shops, and on the roadside to Plas-Tech. Plastics help me earn more money and the environment is clean.

Justin Norman: But how can businesses like Scrapays and Plas-Tech address this problem at greater scale?

Boluwatife Arewa: When we talk about climate tech or recycling, people think of it as a charity first. I like to make it very clear if you look at the business case within recycling itself, it's a multi-billion dollar opportunity. Yes, it might not be the VC model Silicon Valley expects maybe within five years. Within the African ecosystem, it can be 10. But the possibility of value capture within the African ecosystem is so large.

 Justin Norman: Yet, despite the opportunity and demand for recycled raw materials, funding in this space remains low. According to venture capital fundraising data tracked by Africa: The Big Deal, fifty-four different waste management companies have cumulatively raised ⁠$187 million of funding since 2019, less than 1% of total funding on the continent.  

Robin Kariuki: The biggest constraint we are facing currently is number one, capital. Recycling is very capital-intensive. You need a lot of very heavy machinery, a lot of expertise. And the regulatory environment 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.

Justin Norman: In 2017, Kenya introduced a ban on plastic bag bans. In Nigeria, nationwide plastic bag ban in 2019. Then Lagos banned single-use plastics in 2024, finally taking effect in July 2025. But enforcement remains uneven.

There are also Extended Producer Responsibility, EPR, policies being implemented. Under these policies the companies that produce packaging are compelled to pay for the collecting and recycling.

Robin Kariuki: The EPR framework is good. In order to help reduce plastic pollution, we need a multi-sectoral approach. If plastics were made easy to recycle from when they were being produced, it would make it easier for us to do our work.

Boluwatife Arewa: Nigeria has an extended producer responsibility framework. To be fair, it's very nascent. Enforcement is not as strong. Associations like FBRA 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 easier for innovators and everyone involved in the ecosystem. 

Justin Norman: But with the right combination of capital and regulation, these entrepreneurs know what kind of future they want to build.

Boluwatife Arewa: For us, it's very simple. For us to 10x recycling rates. Our goal is to have within five to six kilometers or less, our agents collecting recyclables there. Our model is a decentralized collection model, which means that individuals are not only empowered, they become advocates.

Robin Kariuki: We envision building a small system that can be replicated and deployed across different regions, different communities. Training youth groups on how to use this machine. The plastics generated by one community can be dealt with within that community itself. The households in that community benefit from the plastics generated within that community. So the plastics never really leave the community. That's our working vision.

Justin Norman: 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 waste management on their own. But they show what becomes possible when public systems, markets, informal labour, and capital start to connect. 

Boluwatife Arewa: Climate tech, recycling, the commercials of it are super strong and solid. Waste will always be generated and raw materials will always be needed and those materials are sourced from an effective, traceable recycling ecosystem. 

Justin Norman: So what happens to this bottle? Right now, in Lagos, it could end up three places. In a gutter. Eventually the ocean. Blocking drains until the rain comes. That's option one.

Or it's picked up, weighed on a Scrapays scale, generating instant income for the waste picker. And the plastic goes to a manufacturer who needs it.

Or it gets collected in Mombasa, processed by Plas-Tech, 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 we're willing to leave it there.