Nigeria’s Waste Crisis: An Opportunity in Disguise – Says Researcher

By Tosin Clegg

Nigeria generates more municipal solid waste than any other country in sub-Saharan Africa, yet a large proportion of it never reaches a proper disposal or processing facility. Instead, it accumulates on roadsides, is burnt in the open air, or dumped illegally, a cycle that mismanages potentially valuable materials, harms public health, and places a mounting burden on already stretched local authorities.

A researcher points out that the solution begins with something deceptively simple: getting the waste properly collected in the first place. No material can be recycled, composted, or converted into energy until it has first been physically collected and moved to a processing facility.

Ishmael Onungwe, a researcher at the University of Birmingham, argues that ineffective waste collection is the root cause of Nigeria’s broader waste management failures. No matter how advanced a recycling or recovery facility may be, it can only function if waste arrives there.
“Before any waste component can be recycled, composted, reused, or converted into energy, it must first be collected and transported to a processing facility,” Onungwe explains. “In many Nigerian cities, that step, the most fundamental one, has long been the missing link.”
His research focused on Aba, a major commercial city in southeastern Nigeria widely regarded as one of the country’s most waste-burdened municipalities. With no optimised collection routes and a waste generation rate that overwhelms the city’s basic infrastructure, Aba typifies the challenge facing municipalities across sub-Saharan Africa.

The scale of the global waste crisis is considerable. According to the World Bank, 2.56 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste were generated worldwide in 2022. Developing countries account for 71% of that total, yet they collect a far smaller proportion of what they generate. In sub-Saharan Africa, just 31% of waste is formally collected, the lowest share of any region in the world.

The financial burden is equally stark. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that municipalities in developing countries spend between 20% and 50% of their total operational budgets on waste management, with as much as 80% to 90% of that allocated solely to collection and transportation. Despite this enormous expenditure, the results remain poor, largely because the systems in place are inefficient, unplanned, and unable to keep pace with rapidly growing urban populations.

Onungwe’s response to this challenge is the Beeline API, a mobile-compatible application that designs and optimises waste collection routes across a municipality. Built on an enhanced version of the well-established Dijkstra shortest-path algorithm, the tool calculates the most efficient routes for collection vehicles, based on the locations of communal waste bins, road networks, and transfer stations.

The application is believed to be the first purpose-built, optimised collection and transportation network designed specifically for a commercial municipality in Nigeria, with the potential to be adapted by other cities facing similar challenges.

In practical terms, the Beeline API, with its interface presented below, allows waste management authorities to schedule collections systematically, assign vehicles of appropriate capacity, and forecast operational costs with a level of reliability that ad hoc collection cannot provide. Crucially, it ensures that waste receptacles in hard-to-reach or poorly accessible areas, often the first to be overlooked, are incorporated into the formal collection network rather than left out of it.

The Interface of the Beeline API
Beyond improving logistics, Onungwe’s research is animated by a larger ambition: shifting Nigeria away from a linear economy in which materials are used and discarded towards a circular one in which waste is treated as a resource to be recovered and reused. That shift, he argues, depends entirely on what happens at the very beginning of the waste management chain.
“The materials lost to dumpsites every day represent energy, raw materials, employment, and economic value,” Onungwe says. “A better-designed collection system is the practical first step toward capturing that value.”

Under the current model, waste that could be recycled, composted, or converted into energy is instead disposed of indiscriminately, generating no value while causing significant environmental harm. The Beeline API, by enabling comprehensive, scheduled collection with the capacity for waste segregation, creates the conditions for recycling and recovery to become operational realities rather than distant aspirations.

The methodology underpinning the Beeline API is designed to be replicable. Any municipality grappling with rising waste volumes, inadequate collection infrastructure, and ambitions to adopt more sustainable practices can, in principle, adopt and adapt the tool to its own context. As cities across sub-Saharan Africa and beyond face a waste crisis driven by rapid urbanisation and limited resources, the case for practical, data-driven solutions grows stronger.
For Nigeria, where the waste crisis is both an urgent environmental problem and, as Onungwe insists, an underexploited economic opportunity, the Beeline API represents a practical, deployable step toward cleaner cities and more sustainable use of resources currently being lost.