July Editions

At the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit on 25 September 2015, more than 150 world leaders adopted the new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The 17 new Sustainable Development Goals, also known as the Global Goals, have a more ambitious agenda, seeking to eliminate rather than reduce poverty, and include more demanding targets on health, education and gender equality. They are universal, applying to all countries and all people and aim to end poverty, hunger and inequality, take action on climate change and the environment, improve access to health and education, build strong institutions and partnerships, and more.

With this global transition from millennium development goals to the more effective and broad Sustainable development goals, we highlight how the Wecyclers model works to effectively achieve some of these goals.

Goal 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere. By 2030, eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day.

With the Trash to cash model of Wecyclers, subscribers who make up the first and primary chain of the business are able to create value through their recyclable waste by exchanging trash for products that help aid daily living and in turn reducing poverty.

Goal 4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote life-long learning opportunities for all.
Education remains a top priority and remains the singular most important tool for sustainable development; this has made us implement the Trash for Education program where we reward subscribers with tuition, educational support and educational materials.

Goal 6: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
Lagos, Nigeria with a population of nearly 20 million people produces about 13,000 metric tons of waste bulk of which is left uncollected including recyclable waste. At Wecyclers we are persistently working to reduce the waste crisis in Lagos, create community and concerted efforts to improve sanitation in line with the Sustainable development Goals.

Goal 8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.

In its 3 years of operations Wecyclers team have been able to service to over 7,000 households and create 52 direct jobs and several others through its network. Some of its workers have gone on to imbibe the entrepreneurship drive and in turn become job creators in other aspects. After collection of recyclable waste, Wecyclers aggregates the materials at the household level to sell to local recycling processors. Wecyclers provides a consistent supply of well-sorted, high quality recyclable materials to processors, thereby alleviating their supply constraints and indirectly creating jobs at that level.

Goal 12: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
Vitally important in the Wecyclers operation is the need to create awareness on the need to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns. Through its partnerships and constant community based awareness, Wecyclers has also extended this awareness to the early learners (Children) educating them on the need to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.

Goal 17: Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.
Partnerships build the world over. Through the partnerships we have created with government and businesses we have been able to implement our programmes and as well drive the implementation of the Sustainable development goals by our partners.

Join us as we clean up and promote recycling in Lagos communities. The cleanup day will be in partnership with Oracle.

By Ajibola Ameerah

Every first Monday in October is World habitat day (UN International day) . To commemorate, we had an interview with Mrs Chinwe Ohajuruka, CEO of Comprehensive Design Services to talk about the affordable green houses she has been able to provide for the people of Rivers State.

Mrs Chinwe Ohajuruka

Mrs Chinwe Abulokwe Ohajuruka is a “green” Architect, Project Manager and Sustainability Consultant with over 26  years’ work experience in a variety of international settings. She has been involved with several design projects for collegiate, commercial, residential, institutional and industrial clients. Having designed and managed building projects in Nigeria, the United States and five other countries, she has a diverse background that complements the diverse and international settings she has found herself in. She is the CEO of Comprehensive Design Services,  a firm that is committed to practical sustainable design solutions for Nigeria. The organization started in 2012
Ajibola Ameerah: Congratulations on the 2015 Cartier award for Sub Saharan Africa. How do you feel about the award?

I am very happy, I feel elated and most importantly, I feel Cartier has selected my project because they feel that dignity for Nigerians is important. They have promoted dignity of owning your home of having your own kitchen, bathroom and toilet inside your home where women and girls can be safer with clean water and power.

A: To survive, humans need food, shelter and clothing. Why did you decide to go into building homes and not something else?

Just as you said, food shelter and clothing are fundamental human rights. I am an architect so i have focused on buildings and especially, I have focused on affordable housing because I believe that access to decent affordable housing is a fundamental human right

A.A: It is not common to see builders take renewable energy or going green into consideration as part of their goals when creating structures especially on a large scale in developing countries like Nigeria. What made you think differently?

Because I am a green architect. Green means that I believe in sustainable design, I believe that anything we do should be profitable, should be for the people

A: The population and unemployment rate in the country keeps increasing in geometrical rates, how much of an impact have you made and how many families have benefited from your Passive House Prototypes (PHP) knowing fully well that an unemployed man has limited resources to rent a house; let alone buy one?

Eight families have been transplanted from the slums; the waterside slum in Port-harcourt into our passive house prototypes and we are getting ready to build thirty-two more units next year and sixty-four more units in 2017. We are also working with another state government to build 400 units in the state

A.A: Are you limiting your organization to be a Nigerian affair or going global with it? How do you see this organization in the next 10 years?

I am talking to representatives in 7 other African countries. I am not limiting it to only Nigeria, I am thinking of working around Sub-Saharan Africa

A.A: As any business or social enterprise, limitations and challenges would arise, what are those challenges and how have you been able to overcome them?

Many of the challenges we face have to be solved on a national level. For example, it is difficult to get cheap land in a good area and it is difficult for the people; the off takers of my buildings to get affordable mortgages and so we are working on this. We are working with mortgage and micro finance institutions and we are also talking to the government about making land in good areas available for affordable low cost development

A.A: There are so many people living in slums and poor housing facilities in the country. What do you think the government can do to improve housing conditions of the people?

Many many people have written about what the government needs to do. If you google affordable housing and Nigeria housing deficits, at least 1000 people have written, on the internet, in newspapers, on talk shows, they have advised the government on what needs to be done. So my advice is that the government listens to the people. People have talked about changing the land use tenure system, people have talked about bringing down the price of building materials, people have talked about there being power and water, people have talked about there being affordable mortgages. So many people have said so many things about what needs to be done to fix the housing deficit in the country and the government needs to listen.

A.A: Tell us your vision in 5 words

To be a leading provider of affordable green housing.

This interview was conducted by Ajibola Ameerah, an intern at Wecyclers. She is a student of the University of Ilorin currently pursuing her Bachelor Degree in Geography and Environmental Management.   

By Jordan Ricker

In light of World Population Day (a UN International Day) on July 11, this month Wecyclers looks into how population growth affects the environment. Jordan Ricker of Wecyclers sat down with Dr. Victor Fodeke, an expert on waste management and environmental issues, to discuss how population impacts the environment.

Dr. Victor Fodeke

Dr. Fodeke is a Humphrey Fellow (1988), and an Ashoka Fellow (1997). Dr. Fodeke founded the African Environmental Action Network in Nigeria, which trains recent graduates on community organization and sensitizes them to environmental issues and opportunities for action. In 2008 he was appointed as the Head of the Special Climate Change Unit in the Federal Ministry of Environment in Nigeria, and since 2011 Dr. Fodeke has been a consultant for the African Development Bank as well as an Adviser to the African Union.

Jordan Ricker (JR): How did you first get involved with waste management? 

Dr. Fodeke: My career in the environment started in 1980, but my experience with recycling didn’t emerge until nearly a decade later. I had been working with the Environment Unit in the Ministry of Environment when we had an incident with eco-waste in 1988. We had 4,000 tons of toxic waste brought into Nigeria from Italy. We managed to get the assistance of the U.S. Embassy and one of the expats from the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) trained Nigerians to repackage toxic waste and return it back to Italy. From this experience, I went on to learn about waste management in Seattle, Washington. I was there when the first experiments on waste recycling started at the University of Washington in 1988.

JR: Lagos is the biggest city in Nigeria and the biggest city in all of Africa with an estimated population of 18-21 million people. What effects does this massive amount of people have on the environment in Lagos?

Dr. Fodeke: When you think about a population, you have to look at the ecological resources you have. When the population’s demands on its ecosystem are beyond the carrying capacity of that system, there will be a catastrophe. To give an example, during my Master’s research I was looking at the microbial and heavy metal content in the Lagos Lagoon and discovered that the lagoon basically serves as a depot for untreated industrial effluent that is simply dumped there.

This is just part of the huge waste that is generated in Lagos that is an eyesore to all the city’s inhabitants and unless something is done very quickly to address the issue, there will be an ecological catastrophe. One way to do this is to borrow the waste management model of Seattle, in which the city decided to recycle 60% of their waste in five years (and ended up doing it in three).

JR: So in contrast to Lagos, what is the interplay between the population and the environment in smaller cities in Africa, such as Abuja, Nigeria (approx. 2 million) or Dakar, Senegal (approx. 6 million)?

Dr. Fodeke: No matter the population, it’s important to look at the correlation between population rise and what is being produced against the carrying capacity of that specific ecosystem. No matter the type of waste (air pollutants, solid waste, etc.), they all have to take into account the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. I think one of the main problems is the perception of waste. Waste should not been seen as a nuisance, but as a valuable resource. We’re wasting our waste. In countries across the world, like Sweden, the waste generated there is used for electricity. In other places, waste is not treated as something to be discarded, but as something that can be utilized for reducing, reusing, and recycling. Recycling is a cash cow in Canada and the United States that creates thousands of jobs every year. In Nigeria, we need to see waste as a resource to be utilized and understand that waste can bring wealth!

JR: Going back to Lagos, Nigeria, the World Bank estimates that the population of Lagos will grow at a rate of 5.8% per year to 35 million people by 2025. Will Lagos be able to sustain a population bigger than that of Beijing, China, without suffering serious environmental effects?

Dr. Fodeke: Long range planning is the key to addressing pernicious environmental effects. If Lagos state, and Nigeria in general, already have estimates for the population in 2025, then what is left is utilizing that data to create plans and policies that will be able to address the predicted negative environmental effects of population growth. If Lagos State implemented short, medium, and long range planning on the problems of physical infrastructure, handling pollution, food production, etc., they could seriously reduce the number of issues facing the state government. All of these plans can only be put in place with a lot of information from the get-go. However, the problem is that most administrations don’t plan either before or beyond their four years in office. If you fail to plan, then you are planning to fail.

JR: In the same vein as planning, many people talk about places such as the Nordic countries and Switzerland as being shining examples of environmental policy, waste management, and recycling, often attributed to their excellent foresight of these issues. However, all of these countries have very little or even negative population growth. How does negligible population growth and small population size factor in with a good environmental track record?

Dr. Fodeke: One of the crucial factors in planning is access to data and information. We don’t have the culture of quantitative and qualitative data here in Nigeria. You need to have quality control and data management as the very foundation of your planning and in Nigeria, you cannot rely on that information. Unless there are programs created for data acquisition and management or the establishment of a Bureau of Statistics that can help to generate data for effective implementation, the method of getting these data is not readily or accurately available. The Nordic countries and those like them that have excellent waste management policies in place have a lot of data and they actually use it. For example, they know the birth rates and the death rates of their citizens to a very precise degree. By contrast, those numbers are just general estimates in Nigeria. When you fail to have data at your fingertips then you cannot plan. You are going to head into disaster.

JR: Speaking of data, let me throw some at you. In general trends, while world population growth has decreased from 2% overall in the 1960s to hover around 1.1% in 2015, the world population size itself has drastically increased from approximately 3 billion in 1960 to more than two times that, around 7.3billion in 2015. Considering the sheer amount of people that are now alive, what needs to be done right now to curb environmental degradation? And for Lagos in particular, with a growth rate nearly five times the global average, what needs to be done?

Dr. Fodeke: When I think of best practices, I keep going back to my experiences in Seattle. They made it a state law that 60% of what people living in Seattle generated as waste needed to be recycled within five years. Additionally, state residents had to pay for as much waste as they generated. This example of successful waste management came from recycling being an enforced law that made economic sense. Once people were forced by the government to pay for the amount of waste they were responsible for, they immediately generated less, which saved individuals money and immediately implemented recycling. The city of Seattle can be a microcosm for Lagos, which should be a microcosm for all of Nigeria. The template of Seattle, which redefines waste management as focusing on reducing waste from the source, is applicable no matter a city’s population size and is the best way to effectively address the immense waste problem that the world currently faces.

JR: With the new federal government in Nigeria and state government in Lagos, what are some pieces of advice that you have for President Mohammadu Buhari and Governor Akinwunmi Ambode on environmental legislation?

Dr. Fodeke: First of all, there needs to be environmental laws in this country. The federal, state, and local government need to work together throughout all levels and ensure the laws are followed-through with impact assessment. Secondly, we must start to see the environment as what has been given to us by our parents and what we will give to our children. The new administration has to create policies backed by legislation that is focused on using the environment and protecting it. The laws created must also be practical and enforceable, not draconian; otherwise they will create more problems than they solve. Furthermore, it pays to go green these days – it creates jobs and saves money in both the short and long run. Lastly, from an ethical perspective, people don’t deserve this environment. Human beings deserve to live in an environment that is beneficial to their health, not detrimental to it. The job of the government is to work for the good of the people and one of the basic conditions of that public good is guaranteeing a healthy and clean environment for citizens.

JR: Now let’s look to the future. In examining countries with rising population growth that will be major political and economic powerhouses in the next generation, such as Nigeria, Brazil, and India, what do you suggest these countries do in planning for the environment’s future with the knowledge that their already vast populations will be increasing at such dramatic rates?

Dr. Fodeke: I think one of the key players in planning good environmental policy is the type of government a state has. Democracy is very good in terms of being proactive in enforcing policies. While some of these countries with very large populations are democratic, others are not. In democratic countries, you tend to see more of an environmental bent in discussions of population management. However, a noticeable exception of environmentally conscious policy coming from a democratic country is China. The pollution in China is not so good but China is currently working to correct that. That’s what happens when economic policies are put in place to consider the environment. In the end, it’s about the choices that people make every day about what kind of environment they want to live in and how their choices align or disjoin with that goal.

JR: Do you have any last comments you would like to share?

Dr. Fodeke: What I want to see more than anything else is an international workshop on waste management that look at strategies for Nigeria and discusses how to tackle this problem head-on. I hope this international workshop comes from the National Assembly and the relevant ministries working together to make this happen. Nigeria is a ticking time bomb of eco-catastrophe, but if we address the problem now, we can prevent that catastrophe from ever occurring.

This interview with Dr. Victor Fodeke was conducted by Jordan Ricker, a summer intern with Wecyclers. Jordan is a U.S. American who is currently pursing his undergraduate degree at Franklin University Switzerland in Lugano, Switzerland. He is passionate about both the field of social entrepreneurship and environmental conscientiousness and has found the perfect mesh of the two at Wecyclers.
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By Ebube Okechukwu

Over the past couple of weeks, we have shared information on several recyclable materials that are not commonly known via our social media platforms. Another material that falls in this category is plastic dry cleaning bags.

Recyclable dry cleaning bags in a row

Every time you go to the dry cleaners, your clothes come back to you wrapped in a huge swath of plastic. And, if you are a dedicated recycler or environmentalist, that probably bothers you a little. What are you supposed to do with that plastic sheet once your clothes arrive home?

There’s good news! Most plastic dry cleaning bags are recyclable. Now that you have some basic knowledge of these plastic clothes coverings, let’s look at some more detailed information about these bags.

What are dry cleaning bags made of?
Dry cleaning bags are made with low-density polyethylene, commonly abbreviated as LDPE. This particular type of thin, clear plastic is known as “film” to those in the know in the recycling industry.

Recyclable LDPE

Low-density polyethylene (or LDPE) is used for many other types of film, including plastic shopping bags and trash bags.

Why should I recycle dry cleaning bags?
Dry cleaning bags, like anything else made from plastic, are not biodegradable. That means they will sit in landfills – forever. With the ever-increasing demand for dry cleaning around the world, even these small bags add up to be detrimental to Mother Earth.

There are many other reasons to keep dry cleaning bags out of your garbage can. Plastic is a petroleum-based product so recycling dry cleaning bags actually reduces petroleum use. The bags also contain numerous toxic chemicals, including dioxins, which are released into the air if the plastic is incinerated.

Additionally, dry cleaning bags and other types of film plastic are a real nuisance in the waste stream. The wind catches them easily, so they have a tendency to escape trashcans or piles and create litter on highways and in transfer stations. Film plastic can get caught in recycling machinery, which damages equipment and stalls operations at recycling centers. If that plastic finds its way into the ocean, marine life and birds can eat it, mistaking the bag for food, or get tangled in the folds of the plastic. Finding ways to responsibly recycle the film is beneficial for both the environment and recycling companies.

Recycled dry cleaning bags can be found in furniture, tiles, garbage bags, trashcans, and much more. Recycling plastics uses substantially less energy and produces far fewer environmental toxins then creating new plastic altogether, so it is important to spread the word that dry cleaning bags and other plastic films can be recycled.

As a last reminder, remember that before placing dry-cleaning bags in any type of recycling bin, make sure you have removed all other potential contaminants, including hangers and receipts. Happy recycling!

Culled from:

Bennett, Sophia. “How to Recycle Dry-Cleaning Bags.” Recycle Nation. November 18, 2014. Accessed July 27, 2015. http://recyclenation.com/2014/11/recycle-dry-cleaning-bags

Giller, Chip, and Catharine Wroth. “7 items you didn’t know you could recycle.” Today.com. November 6, 2007. Accessed July 28, 2015. http://www.today.com/id/21642033/ns/today-green/t/items-you-didnt-know-you-could-recycle

Iggyaa, “How to Recycle Plastic Bags, Dry Cleaning Bags, Shrink Wrap.” GreenLifeStyleChanges.com. December 27, 2011. Accessed July 28, 2015. http://www.greenlifestylechanges.com/how-to-recycle-plastic-bags-dry-cleaning-bags-shrink-wrap/