Who Pays for Going Green? Inside Lagos’ Plastic Ban

In June 2020, the four-year-old Azizat was swept to her death during a flash flood in her family compound in Papa Ashafa, Lagos State, Nigeria. She fell into a rushing drainage channel, carried off by the floodwater, while her neighbours watched in horror as the little child disappeared. The severity of the disaster was not only due to natural hazards but mainly because drainage channels in Lagos have often been blocked by waste. Azizat’s death highlighted how the mismanagement of waste in the city can turn a seasonal downpour into a deadly disaster. 

From Plastic Chaos to Policy Change

After an 18-month transition and awareness campaign, a new law came into effect this July in Lagos, imposing a ban on single-use plastic such as Styrofoam food packs, disposable cups, plastic straws, cutlery, and thin plastic bags in an effort to curb plastic pollution in Nigeria’s most populated megacity of over 20 million residents. While it is hailed as a landmark piece of legislation in a country that is the 9th highest contributor to global plastic pollution, with less than 12% recycled, the new plastic ban also reflects a broader dilemma shared by many developing cities: the tension between a drive for environmental reforms and the socioeconomic realities that constrain its implementation. 

According to authorities' estimations, the city of Lagos generates at least 13,000 tons of waste daily, almost a fifth of which is plastic. ‘Lagos State has Nigeria’s smallest landmass, yet it houses roughly 10% of the national population of over 22 million people’, says Udoka Gabriel Onyebuolise, an Innovation and Sustainability professional based in Abuja, in a Zoom interview with FairPlanet. 

For many residents, these statistics translate into devastating personal losses, as the story of Omoh Alokwe shows. She is the co-founder of Street Waste Company, a social enterprise that provides sustainable waste management solutions in Lagos, who started her own company after her house in Ajah town, Lagos state, was washed away by flooding in the canal due to clogged plastic waste. Speaking with FairPlanet on the phone, Alokwe connects Lagos' plastic problem with the city's growing population pressure: ‘Single-use plastics are just used by an individual for an average of 12 minutes and after which he or she disposes of that plastic. So, just imagine our population size globally, even nationally, and if each individual uses that single-use plastic, you could imagine the amount of pollution that this is going to amount to.’

Green Win or Social Burden?

Although environmentalists praised the new law, many challenges remain. Amid the city’s lack of adequate water infrastructure, plastic bottles as well as water 'sachets' - a popular small, sealed plastic pouches containing drinking water - were excluded from the new law. 'Sachets are a major source of plastic pollution, with over 60 million disposed daily in Nigeria. They are lightweight, hard to collect and recycle, thus they clog drains. Lagos did not ban them because safe drinking water access is insufficient. If people had safe tap water, sachets wouldn’t be needed,' said Onyebuolise. 

The lack of a sustainable solution to the sachet and plastic bottles highlights major criticism among customers and small business owners, who claim that the law was put into force while hurting low-income traders in a city where affordability is a major concern. 'I don’t even know what I will use to wrap tomatoes or meat, what do they expect us to use when they are banning plastics without an alternative in place?' said Bimbo Adetol, who works at Oyingbo Market, in an interview with the Nigerian newspaper The Nation. ‘My customers cannot afford to pay for my food if I add an extra 200 naira for reusable plastic containers,’ lamented another street food seller, who noted that asking people to bring their own plates is equally unrealistic in her line of work. 

‘That criticism is fair,’ says Onyebuolise, ‘Many alternatives are made from natural, biodegradable materials that cost around five times more. Lagos acted out of urgency, not because it had perfect alternatives ready.’ To move forward, the city authorities can learn from other African countries like Cameroon and Uganda, where previous plastic bans have failed due to a lack of enforcement, limited alternatives and a thriving black market, as well as insufficient public engagement. Four months since the Lagos ban took effect, some local critics are already voicing similar concerns.

Legacy of scepticism     

Lagos' new plastic ban is another chapter of the city’s reforms that have been met with public distrust. According to Prof Monsuru Muritala, a historian from the University of Ibadan, this pattern already started during the colonial period when Lagos became a colonial administrative capital and commercial hub. As he told FairPlanet, the British colonial authorities wanted to ‘modernise’ Lagos by relocating citizens from overcrowded and poorly planned neighbourhoods into newly designed and modern areas. Post-colonial Nigerian governments continued this pattern, cleaning numerous slums in Lagos.

In Prof Muritala’s view, Lagos’s waste management issues date back to the colonial era. ‘During the 1920s, there was a bubonic plague outbreak caused by poor waste disposal. Waste littered the streets, attracting rats, which spread the plague. The colonial authorities even offered money for every rat killed. That is one of the earliest records of waste-related crises.’

'Previous and reclamation projects in Lagos not only caused anger but also flooding, since swampy areas were sand-filled and built over', he adds. Another historic landmark in Lagos’ environmental history, according to Prof Muritala, was the preparations for hosting Festac ‘77, a month-long international celebration that brought artists and intellectuals from across Africa and the diaspora to showcase Black cultural identity and unity. Lagos' main local councils were unable to cope with the massive volume of waste generated by the crowded city's visitors and new migrants from neighbouring cities and countries in West Africa. In the aftermath of the festival, Lagos gained an unpleasant fame from the international media, describing the city as 'The Dirtiest Capital in the World', thus exposing its inhabitants to global ridicule.

After this embarrassment, Prof Muritala adds, the 1980s were marked by an effort to tackle plastic waste in Lagos by introducing incinerators to burn waste, and vehicles that collected waste once every two or three weeks. ‘Still, many people broke the rules, dumping waste into streams and oceans, leading to floods and blocked drainage, ’ he says. Lessons learnt from the past could hint that while reforms in Lagos attempted to bring progress, they mostly burdened the poor, thus leaving many sceptical of today’s plastic ban.

Punishing Consumers While Producers Walk Free

Offenders of the new law face fines of up to 250,000 naira (≈167 dollars) and suspension of business licenses for repeat violations. Previous reports from successful plastic bans, such as Rwanda and Kenya, have shown that focusing solely on penalties, without providing incentives or proper waste management structures, has been seen as ineffective in curbing the culture of plastic use.

A major factor of success, unfound in Lagos, was offering tax incentives to encourage Rwandan plastic manufacturing companies to switch to recycling and create eco-friendly alternatives. According to Alokwe, while Lagos enforcement teams have already begun raiding retailers and supermarkets, manufacturers in Lagos are allowed to export plastic products outside the city, and are still in talks with the authorities on their accountability. 'Regulations and penalties at the producer level are not yet clearly defined or enforceable,' says Onyebuolise.

'You can’t just sensitise people [about plastic - A.R] without collection, recycling, and waste-to-energy infrastructure', he adds, 'Many people are forced to manage their waste individually. They won’t keep waste at home; they dump it openly or wait for rain so that water carries it away. Lagos collects waste but relies on dumpsites that fill up, and then burn, and it becomes unsustainable. You need higher-capacity infrastructure to match population and waste generation.'

Lagos’s plastic ban marks an important first step, but its success depends on what follows. Nigeria’s federal system and porous borders, where its neighbouring states like Ogun still permit the production and trade of single-use plastics, highlight the need for a Nigerian nationwide framework – one that aligns multiple state regulations, producers, with consumers that would eventually be able to afford sustainable alternatives. A collective action, as such, might become a model for a genuine environmental reform across Africa.