Nigeria’s $89b E-Waste Goldmine Left To Street Scavengers
Every discarded phone, dead generator and cracked television tossed out in Lagos represents money leaving the country, and the sums are no longer trivial. Nigeria, one of Africa’s largest generators of electronic waste, is watching from the sidelines as a $89.48 billion global recycling market takes shape, held back by the absence of formal collection systems, certified plants and any credible end of life plan from the companies that sell the devices in the first place.
The scale of the missed opportunity is captured in figures from Precedence Research, which valued the global e-waste recycling industry at $77.61 billion in 2024 and projected it to reach $279.49 billion by 2033, growing at a compound annual rate of 15.3 per cent. Much of that value is being harvested by China, Germany and the United States, where advanced plants convert old electronics into recovered gold, copper and palladium. Analysts estimate that if Nigeria captured even five per cent of the global market, it could earn about $4.5 billion yearly, create thousands of jobs and build an export stream of refurbished electronics across West Africa.
The country is not short of raw material. Nigeria generates between 500,000 and more than 1.1 million tonnes of e-waste every year, yet operates with almost no formal recycling infrastructure. Data from the Lagos Waste Management Authority showed the state recycled 405 tonnes in 2025, up from 305 tonnes in 2023, a figure that represents less than 0.04 per cent of the national total.
Globally, according to the Global E-waste Monitor produced by the International Telecommunication Union and UNITAR, a record 62 million tonnes of e-waste was generated in 2022, but only 22.3 per cent was formally collected and recycled, leaving roughly $62 billion in recoverable materials unaccounted for. The regional gap is stark. Europe documents a collection rate of about 42.8 per cent, while formally recycled e-waste in African countries sits below one per cent.
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria has flagged the same failure across the continent, noting that printed circuit boards, the most valuable component in the chain, are routinely shipped abroad rather than reclaimed at home. “Currently in Africa, we do not have large-scale dismantling of PCBs, so most countries end up losing economic value by sending these PCBs to Europe and Asia,” said Dr Moshe Masonta of the CSIR. “There is money to be made, but Africa is not benefiting.”
Compounding the loss is external dumping. Studies by the United Nations University indicate that over 60,000 tonnes of used electronics enter Nigeria through its ports yearly, much of it, in the researchers’ description, “truly junk.” Lagos has been repeatedly named among Africa’s busiest entry points for used equipment that circumvents the Basel and Bamako Conventions.
The human cost is severe. The World Health Organisation has warned that prolonged exposure to e-waste toxins can trigger respiratory illness, developmental disorders and cancer. An estimated 100,000 Nigerians, many of them women and children, work as informal recyclers, according to the International Labour Organisation, smashing tubes and burning cables without protective gear. Research on dumpsites in Alaba and Olusosun found lead, cadmium and nickel above WHO limits, with 75 per cent of water samples judged unfit for drinking. Nigeria reportedly burns or dumps over 52,000 tonnes of brominated plastics and 4,000 tonnes of lead each year.
Into this vacuum has stepped a roaming army of door to door collectors who buy condemned devices for between N500 and N10,000 and funnel them through middlemen to scrap hubs, with Ijora in Lagos serving as a central node. “It is my oga that buys from us and then sells it to a company,” one collector explained, describing a value chain few of its own workers fully understand.
The President of the Association of Scrap and Wastepickers of Lagos, Friday Oku, acknowledged that the system leans almost entirely on informal labour with little formal support. For regulators, the near term ambition is more modest than industrial recovery. The Deputy Director of the Electrical Electronics and Waste Control Division at NESREA, Anastasia Akhigbe, pointed to extended producer responsibility portals in South Africa and India as models Nigeria hopes to adopt, alongside the integration of the informal sector.
There is also a quieter risk buried in the trade. Discarded phones and laptops often retain intact storage, and cybersecurity professionals warn that personal photos, banking apps and saved passwords can be recovered long after a device changes hands, feeding identity theft and fraud that most sellers never see coming.