Eco-Warriors in Skirts: How Nigerian Women are Turning Plastic Waste into Wealth from Lagos to Edo
By Isaac Eranga
LAGOS & BENIN CITY, NIGERIA — When the heavy tropical rains hit Nigeria’s major urban hubs, the aftermath used to be a predictable nightmare. From the gridlocked canals of Lagos to the bustling streets of Benin City, the capital of Edo State, rising waters carried a thick, suffocating blanket of single-use plastic bottles, choking drainage systems and paralyzing commercial life.
For Maryam Lawani, living in the Oshodi-Isolo area of Lagos, this environmental crisis was an urgent call to action. In 2015, she founded Greenhill Recycling, an enterprise that now recovers up to 200 tonnes of waste monthly.
Lawani is part of a massive, quiet revolution. Across Nigeria, women are systematically seizing control of the plastics value chain, transforming an ecological emergency into a concrete blueprint for national development.
The Vanguard of the Circular Economy
Nigeria generates an estimated 2.5 million metric tons of plastic waste annually. While municipal waste strategies have historically struggled to keep pace, data from the Global Plastic Action Partnership (GPAP) reveals that women perform the vast majority of household waste sorting and informal collection. In the manual, high-contact stages of the recycling loop—such as recovery, washing, and preparing PET bottles for processing—women represent a driving force.
Today, female-led social enterprises are formalizing this informal labor. In coastal Lagos, initiatives like RESWAYE (Recycling Scheme for Women and Youth Empowerment), founded by Doyinsola Ogunye, have mobilized over 4,000 women across dozens of communities, pulling more than 570,000 kg of plastic out of fragile marine ecosystems.
Further inland, Rita Idehai’s Ecoatta trains widows and housewives in suburban and rural communities to upcycle waste, providing them with safe workspaces and independent income streams.
Replicating the Blueprint: The Edo State Expansion
This women-driven model is rapidly gaining ground in Edo State, where plastic pollution has increasingly threatened public health and infrastructure. In Benin City, the choke points around high-traffic areas like Ramat Park and the Ikpoba River have long been prone to severe seasonal flooding caused by discarded water sachets and single-use containers.
In response, local economic hubs like the Edo Production Centre on Sapele Road are transforming how the state handles waste. Through private-public alignments, firms like Eco Waste to Wealth Recycling are scaling operations in Benin City, creating a growing regional demand for organized plastic collection.
Just as in Lagos, it is local women—market traders, housewives, and youth advocates—who are stepping into this expanding green economy. By building grassroots networks to collect and sort waste before it ever reaches the drainage channels, Edo’s women are transitioning from informal, unprotected waste pickers into recognized financial contributors within the state’s expanding circular economy.
Trash as a Currency for Development
What makes these women-led interventions uniquely powerful is how they link environmental cleanup directly to human and economic development. In a country where poverty and unemployment remain significant bottlenecks, these entrepreneurs use plastic as a socioeconomic lever.
- Education Funding: Through doorstep recovery programs, mothers and young girls collect PET bottles and exchange them with recyclers to pay for school tuition and buy textbooks.
- Financial Inclusion: For many women who previously lacked an independent income, formalizing waste collection provides a reliable financial baseline. Participating women are trained in financial literacy, supplied with personal protective equipment (PPE), and plugged into aggregators offering transparent, performance-based pricing.
”Waste is a currency to address other issues around poverty, unemployment and the environment,” Lawani noted in an interview with Al Jazeera. By pioneering doorstep pickup models, these initiatives bypass traditional, hazardous dumpsites, creating dignified work environments.
Driving National and Regional Growth
The achievements of these women extend far beyond cleaner streets; their work feeds directly into Nigeria’s larger macroeconomic objectives and the Federal Ministry of Environment’s National Circular Economy Policy.
First, by diverting hundreds of thousands of kilograms of plastic from municipal drainage systems, women-led networks significantly mitigate urban flooding. In Edo State and Lagos alike, this protects critical road infrastructure and saves state governments billions in emergency maintenance costs.
Second, the public health impact is profound. Blocked drains are the primary breeding grounds for mosquitoes and waterborne diseases. Clearer waterways lead to lower malaria and cholera infection rates, directly easing the economic burden on Nigeria’s healthcare system.
Finally, the economic potential is immense. Organizations like the UN Global Compact Network Nigeria estimate that scaling up organized collector networks could generate up to 30,000 formal, green jobs for women and youth by 2030.
The unfolding reality on the ground shows that Nigeria’s plastic problem cannot be solved purely through engineering or rigid legislation; it requires local, human-centered action. By empowering the women who manage domestic waste, Nigeria is proving that environmental stewardship is not an economic drain, but a direct path to national prosperity.
To see a real-world example of how these concepts translate into community action, you can watch How Rita Idehai Is Turning Nigeria’s Plastic Problem Into A Lifeline. This video provides a deeper visual look at how women in Nigerian communities are being trained to transform waste into a sustainable source of income.
