[ad_1]
“Our linear approach to delivering public goods and services shall be re-evaluated and the principles of circular economy shall be adopted fully” – Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu
From Wednesday, July 26 to July 27, the Lagos State Government hosted the world at the Lagos Continental Hotel, in a first-of-its-kind event in Africa nay the developing world, designed to pioneer the transformation of the current linear production order towards a more sustainable and regenerative paradigm. Put together in collaboration with the African Circular Economy Network and the Circular Economy Innovation Partnership with support from the Government of the Netherlands, the Lagos Circular Economy Hotspot turned out to become the envisioned regional agenda-setting conference to aid us navigate the reality of resource scarcity by shifting to an innovative, sustainable consumption model to save the future generation.
With the theme, “Towards a Circular and Resourceful Economy: The Future Lagos,” the high-level event was unveiled by the Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who said the circular economy must be encouraged to sustain resilient socio-economic development in the state and that a deliberate shift from materialisation to de-materialisation was thus required. He also led other guests and officials round the pavilions where several indigenous circular concepts and products were on display by Nigerian eco-entrepreneurs. Indeed, his state lived up to expectation in hosting the global circular community as the CEH had previously been hosted in The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Catalonia Spain and Dublin Ireland; and now hosted in Africa for the first time.
Truly, the ‘Eko for Show’ spirit was excitingly engraved in all aspects of the circular experience, tapering from the quality of international participants, versatile panel conversations, strategic match-making sessions, innovative circular products, enthralling cultural dance-drama, colourful ambience décor, handy customised souvenirs and corporate identification lanyards. Yet, there are a couple of concrete issues emanating from the hotspot which, I think, must be properly escalated, developed and mainstreamed in order for our society to benefit from this continental transformational train that just took off from Lagos – next stops are South Africa (2024) and Ethiopia (2025).
The first issue is in taking advantage of the offerings from The Netherlands-Lagos circular economy partnerships. The Kingdom of Netherlands’ Deputy Consul General in Lagos, Leonie Van der Stijl, in her speech at the event, revealed that the country was currently subsidising the Dutch circular company, Closing the Loop, to work on setting up the first electronic waste recycling facility in Africa, in Lagos.
To me, it was specially exciting news because, a couple of months ago, I suggested on this column that Nigeria and The Netherlands set up bilateral green social enterprise development hubs that not only ignited business relationships, but also explored other areas such as technology transfer and circularity educational curriculum. My comment was informed by the observation of the Dutch companies’ solid circular footprints at the Abuja leg of The Netherlands Nigeria Clean Tech event.
I was of the view that companies like “Closing the Loop” and “Waste Transformers” have a lot to teach Nigerian eco-entrepreneurs in order for us to take advantage of the enormous waste resources that have plagued our ecosystem, but which could essentially become wealth and job-generators if we are able to deploy the right acumen to innovate and engage. This is exactly what circular economy is all about, and what LCEH23 has set out to achieve.
It gets more interesting. Ms Van der Stijl then offered an icing-on-the-cake offer to Lagos. She said, “We also like to take this moment to offer Lagos State to co-design an exchange programme focused on building innovation hubs for sustainability; hubs that can connect the brainpower that is flowing out of the universities here in Lagos to industry and investment in public private partnerships. We look forward to an opportunity to co-designing an exchange on that. It used to be a major challenge in The Netherlands to connect innovation to industry. But I think we have cracked the nuts by building a model with municipalities, right policies, investors, starter ecosystems and university; and we look forward to connecting with Lagos State on that.”
Surely, if properly implemented, this knowledge to business linkages could redefine Nigeria’s entire socio-economic landscape for the best, and, perhaps, help us to start “breaking the pattern of how we have always done things by not standing on existing protocol” as the Deputy Consul General had wished.
Nevertheless, I am worried that these delicious offers may not find the fertile soil to germinate if we refuse to think out of the box in order to deploy strategies that suit our peculiar environment. For instance, we need to tweak our present circularity model to accommodate the informal sector in a way that it dovetails into the emerging Netherlands-Lagos circularity network.
To put this in perspective, let us look at the reality of the West’s circularity model. Most of the rich natio ns ship their end-of-life products, especially electronic and electrical products, to developing regions like Africa as a way of taking care of their waste. This then leaves the developing world with a deluge of end-of-life products. And the sad reality is that at this stage they have a very short life before going to waste, and recycling is not as carbon neutral as it seems. It requires a lot of heating, chemical and mechanical processes, etc. For instance, the extraction of gold requires the use of hydrochloric or nitric acid to remove it from panels. The question is, after extraction, how do you dispose the acid, as they could seep into the ground water system?
Everest Akpo is the Chief Executive Officer of Ivarest Global, a startup that converts plastic waste to sustainable building materials. He is one of the circular entrepreneurs that exhibited their innovations at the LCEH23. He told me that the best way Nigeria could bring in the informal sector was by mainstreaming refurbishment in the country’s circular mix. He said India, a country with similar socio-economic circumstances, was putting more investments in refurbishing centres than in recycling centres for electronic and electrical waste, for the three-way reason that refurbishment creates more jobs, saves the environment from pollution, and allows waste materials to stay in the loop for longer periods.
“Refurbishment in the informal sector already exists here but we need to recognise it and utilise what we have, scale it up, and extract national value out of it. In Alaba International, for instance, an average person goes there to repair his electronics. Where do these repairers get the parts from? Some of them get them from household waste, while others import them. They get it from imported waste plastics they dismantle for parts. So there is an existing market already. But they are running in silos. I did a little case study where we dismantled a bad television into parts. I sold that TV within minutes into the market, and I got more than five times the value of scraps.
“The best way to go about this is to have a proper collection system. After collection, the next step should not be recycling, but refurbishing. Now, once there is an existing facility where this stuff can be tested and only the bad parts will be recycled, the good parts are then sent back to the market to be reused in our electronics and electrical products in terms of repairs and refurbished equipment. They will create value, to be bought and used by those at the lower ends of the economic ladder. This is circular economy in action,” Everest narrated.
To be continued
[ad_2]
Source link