- Written by By Gbenga Salau
THOUGH people whose houses are located beside dumpsites and landfills feel bitter that activities in those places are injurious to their health, what many of them do not know is that dustbin economy is one of the most thriving in Nigeria today.
According to experts, wastes generated at homes and in the office, when recycled, have the potential of yielding large income and revenue. Currently, a lot of people are earning a living from the dumpsites, not as managers of those sites, but scavengers of the huge waste brought into the landfills. Daily, they spend hours dining and wining in refuse, as they sort out from garbage, metals, plastics, bottles and other items that could be re-sold. But the painful thing is that these dumpsites are not properly managed in line with best practices.
According to some of the people, who spoke to The Guardian, this is the reason for the pungent smell that ooze out of the dumpsites, apart from the underground water contaminated as a result of the dumpsite close to them.
These scavengers are careless about the negative consequences of working in landfills on their health. On a good day, the dumpsites are like factories and warehouses where trucks go to offload raw materials and get loaded with finished products — bags, ladies’ attachment, plastic chairs, gallons, bottles, shoes and many more.
During a recent visit, it was discovered how wastes are treated at the dumpsites and the landfills. How trucks load plastics, metals, bottles and items that could be re-cycled by nylon, plastic and steel manufacturing companies.
The minutes spent at those sites revealed how scavengers work like factory workers, who help in processing the raw materials and sort out the good from the bad among the unwanted materials brought into the landfills.
So, some Nigerians are actually smiling to the bank as they get their take home pay directly and indirectly from other people’s waste. To these people, they probably operate within the dustbin economy as it has provided a chain of employment for scavengers, loaders, agents, who serve as middlemen that sell the plastics, metals and others to corporate organisations and then the owners and drivers of the trucks, which convey the items to the factory.
At the Soulos sites in Igando, a man was seen spreading clothes on the different section of the dumpsite. The clothes were not neat. They looked like clothes that were just removed from refuse brought into the dumpsite, as there were dirty stains on them besides being wet.
For the plastic chairs, according to one of the sellers, a kiloramme goes for N50 and there are customers who buy in bulk.
According to one of the buyers, Mr. John Ikemefuna, who deals in bottles, he has been in the business for upward of 15 years, and he has no regret taking up the business.
Ikemefuna said the stench does not affect him anymore because he has adapted to the environment. “Initially, the environment was not friendly, but with time, I became used to it,” he said.
During the early stages, he will force himself to endure the stinking smell around the place, but now, he has no issues with the smell from the dumpsite.
He said some traders, who deal in fairly used clothes and bags, buy from them. According to Ikemefuna, what many of the traders do is to wash the clothes and bags thoroughly in a way that it wouldn’t show that they were picked from dustbin.
At the Isolo Dumpsite, the operational mode differs from that of the Soulos in Igando. In Igando, fresh refuse are always the commodity exchange, deliberately giving opportunity for scavengers to look for plastics, bottles, metals and wire; for Isolo, the collectors purposefully scavenge for waste bottles, plastics, metals and wire.
One of the operators at the Isolo site, Mr. Maude Umar, who has been in the business for over the last 35 years, said he started out by going round the streets of Lagos picking and buying disused plastic and glass bottles aside from other items such as wire. Now he is a wholesaler.
Umar, a father of six, disclosed that there are boys who work under him, using his carts to go out to pick and buy plastic and glass bottles among other items. He said he has been performing his role dutifully as a father of six children and two wives, who are all based in Rimi Town, Katsina State, with the proceeds from the waste business.
According to him, what some wholesalers do, is to get carts that will be used, besides giving them some cash to buy disused bottles when need arises.
He revealed that a kilogramme of plastic is bought for between N20 and N22 from scavengers and sold for N27 to agents, who work for the manufacturing companies, mostly Chinese companies, while one kilogramme of Iron is bought for N30 and sold for N40 to agents.
According to him, once they heap up the disused bottles and plastics up to a good level, the agent is invited to take them to the companies in need of them.
He revealed that the truck and the ware are measured and when the truck has offloaded the goods, the truck’s weight is re-measured. The difference in the measurement before the truck offloaded and after is the scale of the goods, which determines the amount that the agent would pay to them.
He said now, they do not have a scale to buy glass bottles from scavengers and would be sellers. The estimation of the pricing for glass bottles, he said, is done through facial scaling. According to him, they buy broken bottles because when they buy glass bottles, they have to break the bottles into pieces before they sell to agents at N25,000 per tonne. This, he said, is why they are also interested in buying broken bottles.
For him, in spite of the assistance they give to government in its effort to make the state clean, through picking plastic and glass bottles, sometimes from drainages, that effort is not being appreciated by the state, as their boys who go round picking these disused bottles and metals are often arrested by Kick Against Indiscipline, (KAI) officers.
To prove that some of the plastic bottles were picked from drainages, he showed this reporter some dirty plastic bottles picked from drainages and on the streets. He also said that most times when the boys are arrested, KAI officers, not only demand that they be bailed with N10,500, but searched and money found on them seized and not returned after they might have been bailed.
He disclosed that on many occasions, the money on these boys were given to them by their bosses to buy glass bottles, plastics, metals and wire, if they had to buy from residents because it is not all the time that the boys pick the items from drainages or on the streets.
He said that in most cases, when the boys are arrested and their money seized, when they are eventually released, these boys run away from their bosses knowing full well that if they returned, they would have to work to repay the debt. So most of the times, the bosses bear the consequences of the arrest, which means losing the money used in bailing the boys and the one given to them to buy wares.
He pleaded with the state government to instruct KAI officials not to arrest their men as they are helping to make Lagos a clean state. According to him, any of the cart pushers, who dispose refuse indiscriminately, is dealt with by them.
Umar revealed that in December, business is usually on the low side, with prices dropping because companies are rounding off their activities for the year. “But in the New Year, price goes up again when companies resume for work.
One of the operators on the site disclosed that sometimes some of the glass bottles are sold to women selling groundnuts after the bottles had been thoroughly washed. He disclosed that he buys ‘Lucozade’ bottle for N10 and sell at N25 to any interested buyer.
One of the scavengers, Abubakar Ali, said that his profit daily ranges between N1000 and N4000. According to him, the daily profit is high if most of the disused plastics, bottles and other items were picked from drainages and on the roads.
To transfer the items to the factories, they are put in big shacks. During the visit, some of the wares ready for the factories were already packed in very extremely large shacks.
The Managing Director of Richbol Environmental Services, Mr. Olugbenga Adebola, who owns a re-cycling company, said that the solid waste management sector, encompassing all aspects of integrated solid waste management practice vis-à-vis collection, transportation, recovery, recycling and merchandise of both recovered and recycled materials, is an institution on it’s own, which has established a very high network.
For him, it is exciting and fulfilling to be in the waste management business because apart from being a business it helps humanity and environment though the return is on the low side.
He disclosed that his company recycles all forms of disused bottles of pure water and soft drinks.
According to him, they get materials through buyback from the resource recovers (scavengers), who gather the bottles, until they reach the required volume.
“Some of our boys, as a company which collects waste, sort these things while they work and we compensate them by paying for this effort. We are doing a lot of advocacy so that people will see waste as a resource and begin to sort the waste from the source, which could be a source of income for the family and a way to safe the environment as it becomes cleaner.”
He said that there is no specific rate the disused bottles are bought from the scavengers or the resource merchants because the amount depends on the distance, whether a vehicle is going to pick the volumes of bottle or it would be brought to the factory. He disclosed that the rate however varies between N10 and N20 per kilogramme.
Speaking on the challenges in the business, he said the first is irregular electricity supply because recycling is like other industries that require a lot of machinery and electricity to run. “When the electricity supply is not available, it impairs production. And it is not profitable running on generator, which usually jack up the cost of production, eating up the profit.
For him, the second challenge is funding as the banking sector is not interested in funding the sector probably because they do not know how the sector works. “The equipments do not come cheap. The land constrain is another. To be involved in re-cycling business, a very large land is needed as the plastics come in volumes. Sorting the waste is also not easy.
“There is a need for awareness so that the citizens would appreciate the need to sort their waste, which Lagos is doing better than other states though it could be better.”
Adebola listed the practitioners in the sector to include; cart pushers, cart builders, scavengers, who he felt should be called resource recovers, resource merchants and recyclers.
THE CART PUSHERS:
These are the group of informal private operators involved in the house to house waste collection at a fee, using specially built carts. They were brought into the industry by the ineffectiveness of the government owned agencies responsible for the collection, transportation, and the disposal of waste.
At a stage, they were collecting over 70 per cent of the total waste generated in the state, this they do by house to house collection and transportation of the collected waste to transfer bins strategically placed by government agency.
They also sort and recover reusable and recyclable materials from the waste before disposing the residue. The non-formalization of the activities of the group has made it almost impossible to have accurate data/records of their activities within the waste management industry. However, they cart away hundred of tons of waste per day and make an average of two thousand six hundred naira (US $20.00) per day.
In Lagos State alone, it is estimated that over five thousand (5,000) cart pushers are operating within the industry.
CART BUILDERS:
This is another group of locals who are also playing a major role in the integrated solid waste management. Though very small in number, they are the one that invest their money in the construction of the carts being used by the cart pushers. The number of carts constructed and put for lease/ hire to the cart pusher by individuals ranges from 5 to 50 depending on the financial capacity of each individual involved in the business. The business venture is a very lucrative one with very high return on investment; the cost of renting each cart is between N150.00 ($1.15) and N250.00 ($1.92) per day, depending on the area and locality, whereas the cost of constructing a standard cart is put at between N15, 000 and N20, 000.00 ($115.38 and $153.84 respectively). Within six months of construction, each cart pusher would have repaid the investment cost with reasonable profit with little or no overhead.
THE SCAVENGERS:
This is the only group /organization so far identified in Lagos State that is involved in both on-site and off-site waste/ resource recovery, they recover re-usable and recyclables materials like plastics, Aluminum, glass, paper, scraps metal, animal wastes like horn, bones etc.
Some of them go from door-to- door to recover re-usable and recyclable materials, while majority limit their operation to the waste brought to the disposal sites.
In some cases, the scavengers also process some of the recovered waste before selling either to the resource merchants or directly to the recycling industries. The processes include washing, burning, etc.
Majority of the scavengers live in shanties or makeshift houses built on and around the disposal sites.
It is a common sight within this community/ neighborhood to see heaps and mountains of recovered materials waiting to be purchased or transported to the recycling companies. Several million-naira worth of materials are recovered yearly by over four thousand scavengers within this bracket of informal private sector in integrated solid waste management in Lagos state.
An investigation shows that only about 50 per cent of the recovered items serves as raw materials to the industries within Lagos State and the entire country, the remaining 50 per cent is exported to some other countries in Africa like; Ghana, Togo, Cameron, Mali, Republic of Niger, Sudan etc, for both industrial and personal use. (Recycling and Re-use)
THE RESOURCE MERCHANTS:
This group is made up of traders (merchants) involved in the purchase of all recovered recyclable and re-usable materials from the scavengers. Some members of this group are retired scavengers who cannot scout for materials on the site again due to either age or advancement in financial capability.
They are so wealthy that some of them are involved in the exportation of some of the recovered resources to other countries thereby earning foreign exchange; they are also very influential that they get Local Purchasing Orders (LPOs) from companies to supply recovered materials.
THE RECYCLERS:
This is another component of informal private sector that include both the micro and the small scale recycling companies, they convert recovered waste materials such as paper, aluminum, animal by-products, plastics scrap metals etc, to valuable materials and raw materials for the consumption of the industrial sector.
The recycling sector is a multi- million-naira investment, where some specialised equipment and machines are used for the conversion of the recovered items to finished products or raw materials that are also used in several other applications. Some of these recycled products and raw materials are exportable products through which foreign exchange is obtained. These industries provide more than 2000 job opportunities for different cadre of work force.
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