Professor Mynepalli Sridhar, a consultant and professor of Environmental Health at the University of Ibadan, has said that the simple act of segregation of waste into the major types will go a long way to solve Nigeria’s waste problem.
He said this at an event to mark the World Environment Day hosted by the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, University of Ibadan (UI), in collaboration with the Nigerian Network for Awareness and Action for Environmental Health.
Professor Sridhar told Nigerian Tribune that, “As it is now in Nigeria, all of us are mixing all types of waste into one bin; that is where we are creating the problem.” He said mixing biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste together makes it difficult to effectively utilise the waste.
“If we can allow communities to segregate waste at least into major components – organic, plastic, metal – these are the three major ones; if you can ask them to separate the waste into two bins or three half the problem is solved.” He said that doing this would make it easy for plastic, metal or organic waste collectors to collect and recycle the respective waste materials,thus “the problem of waste is removed.”
He added that although waste recycling was taking place in Nigeria, it was going on in an informal manner. “We need to encourage recyclers and make it formal. When we do this more people will join.”
In his welcome address, Dr OladapoOkareh, Sub Dean, Faculty of Public Health, UI, situated the plastic pollution crisis, noting that globally one million plastic bottles are purchased every minute; and 500 billion disposable plastic bags are used worldwide every year. “We are campaigning to phase out all unnecessary plastic use and significantly improve reuse and recycling,” he said.
Adding his voice, Dr Godson Ana, representing Environmental Health Scientists Association of Nigeria (EHSAN) at the event, said that“changes in consumption patterns have affected what we do with waste materials. Today we are haunted by the scourge of plastics that has inundated our communities.”
He charged the audience, especially the youth, on the “need to commence a drastic attitudinal change. What is happening to us is because we have refused to embrace the right attitude towards the environment.”
Dr Godson advocated proper disposal of plastic waste, adding that, “In our various industries, how much of the plastics can we avoid and use alternative resources? The need to embrace other resource materials that are decomposable and channel these resources into other applications without endangering our ecosystem is the reason why we are here today.”