At the Nigerian Institution of Environmental Engineers’ World Environment Day lecture, Engr. Oladele Fadipe made the case that Nigeria’s waste problem is, in fact, a resource problem — and the solution is already within reach.
By Isqil Najim
Nigeria throws billions of naira away every day; in landfills, open dumps, and unmanaged sewage pits , and calls it waste management. Engr. Oladele Fadipe, believes that is the country’s most expensive mistake.
He made this observation while delivering address at the World Environment Day lecture organised by the Nigerian Institution of Environmental Engineers in Abuja.
Armed with field experiences, Fadipe, who is a Fellow of NSE and NICE, declared that the future of waste management does not lie in disposal but in resource recovery and circular economic value creation.
He revealed that more than 3.6 billion people worldwide lack access to safely managed sanitation, according to the World Health Organisation and UNICEF. The consequence is untreated wastewater draining into rivers, flooding open spaces, and fuelling outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and hepatitis. Nigeria, he noted, sits squarely inside that crisis.
To Fadipe, however, the problem is not about the scale of the problem. It was about the missed opportunity. Every tonne of organic waste; human sewage, animal manure, food market leftovers, abattoir blood and gut content, agricultural residues, carries within it the raw material for biogas, electricity, and organic fertiliser. This, according to him is an old model that take resource and pays to get rid of it.
The circular economy model, Fadipe revealed, turns the same material into revenue, saying that “every litre of wastewater holds the potential to power homes, enrich soils, and protect the environment — if we choose circularity.”
According to him, a single cow produces between 0.8 and 1.2 cubic metres of biogas daily. One cubic metre of biogas generates up to 2.2 kilowatt-hours of electricity. Scaled up to a facility processing 1,000 cubic metres of biogas a day, that is enough power for residential communities, markets, schools, and hospitals. It is on this basis that he made his central claim, that in a circular economy, sanitation becomes an engine of opportunity rather than a cost of development, because waste, properly understood, is not the end of a cycle; it is the beginning of a new value chain.
He pointed to Copenhagen as example. Through its Circular Copenhagen programme, the Danish capital cut CO₂ emissions by 21 percent between 2005 and 2011, and by 2022 per-capita emissions had fallen from 4.7 tonnes to 1.3 tonnes. The city achieved this not by asking residents to recycle more, but by rebuilding the systems that handle waste at source — a model Fadipe believes Nigerian cities can replicate with the right investment and political backing.
Closer to home, Fadipe’s own firm, ELFAD Concept, has for years run biogas sewage treatment plants across the country. He showed the audience completed installations: domes buried beneath driveways, treatment plants at hotels in Ibadan, and green estates in Lagos irrigated by treated effluent that would otherwise have been discharged as pollution. Before-and-after images of influent and treated water, he said, told the story more plainly than any statistic could.
His prescription for Abuja was direct: the city needs biodigesters and resource recovery systems deployed at scale — across households, markets, abattoirs, and municipalities — rather than as pilot projects gathering dust in ministry reports. The technology already exists, he stressed, and the feedstocks are already being produced daily by the city’s residents and livestock. What is missing is the political will to treat sanitation as infrastructure rather than an afterthought.
Fadipe, who is the reigning Engineer of the Year 2025 recipient, called on government ministries responsible for environment, water resources, public health, and municipal affairs to develop regulatory frameworks that make circular waste systems bankable for private investors.
Fecal waste, he said, “becomes a threat only when we waste its value”
For a rapidly urbanising city like Abuja, Fadipe warned, the cost of inaction compounds every year. The alternative like biogas from fecal waste, compost from market refuse, electricity from sewage sludge, and carbon credits from captured methane is not futuristic; it is already operational elsewhere and Nigeria can tap into it.
“A nation that closes its sanitation loop opens the door to clean water, clean energy, and resilient communities.” he concluded.
Earlier in his address, the National chairman, also spoke at the event.
Isqil Najim can be reached on Linkedin HERE
