By some estimates, the continent, and particularly the sub-Saharan region, will see its waste generation double by 2050 – yet many African countries still lack comprehensive waste management systems.

Mohammed Dahiru Aminu, policy manager for methane pollution prevention in Africa at the Clean Air Task Force, unpacked the problem in a December 2024 opinion piece for the Africa Policy Research Institute. ‘While waste management is a significant issue across the globe, its complexities are felt most acutely in developing regions,’ he writes. ‘As waste volumes grow in these regions, driven largely by increasing populations and urbanisation, the challenge of managing waste in a sustainable and environmentally conscious manner has never been more pressing.’

Aminu adds that the quality of a country’s waste management is ‘inextricably linked’ to its economic standing. ‘This means that, although wealthier nations generate more waste than their less affluent counterparts, in developing regions like sub-Saharan Africa, waste management practices are often inadequate,’ he says. He notes that this leads to uncontrolled disposal and open waste burning, which contribute significantly to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

A study published in 2024 by China’s Chongqing University was even more damning. Rating the performance of South Africa and Niger’s municipal solid waste (MSW) treatment as ‘weak’ and ‘without future plans’, the study authors claim that both countries ‘conform to some stereotypes based on economic development status’. ‘Within them, the careless disposal of waste is a normal treatment,’ they say.

Janine Osborne, CEO of South African marine conservation organisation the Sustainable Seas Trust, sees it differently. ‘The plastic pollution problem in Africa is more nuanced than those faced by other regions, primarily because of the continent’s rapid development, population growth and our diverse economic groups with varying needs and challenges,’ she writes in an opinion piece for the Mail & Guardian. ‘Large coastal countries like South Africa and Egypt face different waste-management challenges to small island states, such as Mauritius, or landlocked countries like Lesotho.

‘We know that municipal solid-waste collection services in most African countries are inadequate,’ she writes. ‘And, as our population continues to grow, waste generation is fast outpacing collection and management capacity. The plastics issue is not considered a priority for many impoverished communities, where meeting basic survival needs is a daily challenge.’

While the Sustainable Seas Trust focuses on plastic waste, Osborne’s comments have broader application to solid waste in general. And in Africa as in other regions, electronic waste (or e-waste) is becoming a growing problem. According to a 2024 report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (Unitar), the 62 million tons of e-waste generated in 2022 will fill 1.55 million 40-ton trucks – about enough to form a bumper-to-bumper line of trucks encircling the equator.

If that line of trucks were to park in Africa, it would find much of the continent’s soil contaminated with high concentrations of lead – another by-product of Africa’s waste management problem.

‘One of the most alarming sources of lead poisoning comes from mismanaged e-waste and used lead-acid batteries [ULABs],’ say Angélique Umutesi Muhavani and Alexander Mangwiro, who work together in the chemicals and pollution action subprogramme of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (Unep) African Office. ‘Informal recycling practices release lead particles into the environment, endangering countless communities.

‘Across Africa, the numerous cases illustrate the scope of the problem: lead mining in Nigeria, ULAB processing in Senegal and toxic waste in Zambia’s Kabwe region. In Kenya’s coastal city of Mombasa, the residents of the Owino Uhuru area still bear the scars of pollution from a lead-acid battery smelting plant. For these communities, the right to a clean environment depends on effective policies for hazardous waste management,’ they say.

Cosmas Luckyson Zavazava, director of the ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau agrees that an enormous amount of e-waste is generated around the world, ‘from discarded televisions to dumped telephones’.

‘The latest research shows that the global challenge posed by e-waste is only going to grow,’ he says. ‘With less than half of the world implementing and enforcing approaches to manage the problem, this raises the alarm for sound regulations to boost collection and recycling.’

To that end, the ITU and Unitar are collaborating on the Global E-waste Monitor, a repository of e-waste data that will inform decision-making on the global transition to a circular economy for electronics.

Africa has become a hotspot for e-waste. One site, Agbogbloshie, near Accra in Ghana, is particularly notorious. At one stage it was receiving 15 000 tons of discarded electronics each year, leading the Basel Action Network to dub it a ‘digital dumping ground’.

From that has emerged a vibrant informal recycling economy, with local informal marketplaces selling old laptops and mobile phones to buyers who either repair them or extract their precious metals. But the World Health Organisation warns that people who sort e-waste at sites such as Agbogbloshie risk exposure to more than 1 000 harmful chemicals, including lead, mercury and brominated flame retardants.

Part of the problem in Agbogbloshie and other landfills like it is that the exporters who dump materials there don’t separate functional e-waste (which can be recycled or upcycled) from non-functional e-waste (which can’t and can be dangerous).

‘If you have a container full of TV screens, how on earth are you going to verify each and every one of them to make sure they are functioning?’ photojournalist Bénédicte Kurzen, co-author of an award-winning feature on Ghana’s e-waste problem, asked NPR.

It’s a good question, and a problem that waste management companies face across Africa. MTN Benin is working to solve the problem. In collaboration with Ericsson, the telecoms giant has collected, decommissioned, transported and recycled more than 123 tons of e-waste since 2021.

In a similar project, Vodacom South Africa has partnered with not-for-profit producer responsibility organisation Circular Energy to divert e-waste from landfills into recovery and recycling programmes. ‘E-waste is our business’ second-most material environmental issue, and encouraging circularity is key to our purpose, which includes empowering people while protecting the planet,’ says Takalani Netshitenzhe, external affairs director at Vodacom South Africa.

In both cases, the idea is to move away from linear consumption patterns, where electronic products are made, used and discarded, towards a more circular economy that minimises resource consumption by extending the products’ lifecycle. ‘Consumers play a pivotal role in promoting a circular economy,’ says Netshitenzhe. This includes repairing, reusing and recycling devices in Vodacom’s RedLovesGreen initiative.

But many of the challenges identified in 2018 by Unep’s Africa Waste Management Outlook report remain. ‘A large range of alternative waste treatment technologies are available on the market and could be immediately inserted into cities and towns in Africa,’ the report noted.

‘The appropriateness of these technologies for Africa must be questioned, however. Constraints to technology uptake include lack of political will, lack of enabling regulatory environment, large investment requirements, lack of local technical skills to properly manage the system and the need to include formal and informal actors in the system.

‘A further restriction is the lack of widespread separation-at-source of potentially recyclable waste,’ the report says.

That was seven years ago. The continent’s waste management challenge hasn’t gone away since then – and the spike in e-waste has only made it that much harder to find workable solutions.

Images: Pixabay, Gallo/Getty Images