Why recycling is Africa’s most scalable waste solution

From the newsletter

A new study by environmental NGO Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) finds that zero waste is the most cost-effective pathway for managing Africa’s growing waste crisis. Unlike incineration, which would require cities to build expensive new plants, zero waste can adapt to rising populations through composting and recycling.

• Waste-to-energy incineration requires billion-dollar plants and fixed waste streams, investments that remain financially and politically unrealistic for most African cities.

• Zero waste systems expand flexibly, enabling cities to strengthen composting and recycling while creating jobs, cutting costs and offering climate benefits.

More details

• The study, Zero Waste as An Effective Climate Strategy was conducted in Lagos (Nigeria), Barueri (Brazil) and Quezon City (Philippines). It compared three waste pathways: business-as-usual dumping and landfilling, capital-intensive waste-to-energy incineration and modular zero waste strategies such as source separation, composting and recycling. The study found that incineration demands billion-dollar infrastructure and fixed waste streams, making it costly and inflexible, while zero waste systems like recycling are cheaper to scale and more adaptable to growing cities.

• To deliver meaningful climate benefits, incineration would require a scale-up far beyond current plans. Lagos, for instance, would need seven additional incinerators, while Quezon City would need three. Such expansion represents four to eight times current plans and is deemed both financially and politically unrealistic, given the billion-dollar price tags, long permitting timelines and public resistance often associated with these projects.

• Recycling and composting offer a far more adaptable alternative. Cities can begin with neighbourhood-level composting, small recycling hubs or improved collection systems, and expand these incrementally as populations and budgets grow. This modular approach keeps pace with urbanisation while avoiding the financial risks of mega-projects that demand huge upfront investment and long-term contracts. The benefits compound over time: in Lagos, the zero waste pathway achieves climate gains equivalent to removing 100 million cars from the road, while incineration ultimately results in net warming by 2060.

• The study also warns of the lock-in risks posed by incinerators. Because these plants require a constant stream of combustible waste, they directly compete with recycling by burning valuable paper, plastics and organics. This undermines circular economy goals and ties cities into decades of debt, emissions and dependence on waste generation. Zero waste systems, on the other hand, reinforce upstream strategies like waste prevention, reuse and recycling, offering a more flexible and future-proof approach.

• On the financial front, zero waste facilities require far lower upfront investment and create more jobs per tonne of waste managed than incineration or landfilling. For Africa in particular, this approach builds on the work of informal waste pickers who already deliver high recycling rates without formal recognition. The report highlights cities such as Buenos Aires, Bengaluru and Rabat where formally integrating waste pickers into municipal contracts raised recycling rates and improved wages, healthcare access and safety.

• In terms of performance, the gap between zero waste and incineration grows wider over time. While incineration may achieve modest methane reductions in the short term, these gains are outweighed by long-lived carbon dioxide emissions. By 2060, zero waste consistently outperforms, achieving up to nine times more avoided warming in Lagos and thirty times more in Quezon City. Even in Barueri, where the study modelled a highly favourable but unrealistic 100% incineration scenario, zero waste still outperformed by nearly 40%.

Our take

• Africa’s rising population makes zero waste investment urgent, with failure to act risking locking cities into costly, polluting systems.

• Africa needs to rethink its current circular economy priorities, which often favour waste-to-energy investments over recycling.

• Africa’s focus on waste-to-energy is largely driven by renewable energy goals. Yet these plants still contribute to carbon emissions and are difficult to scale, highlighting a clash in policy priorities.