Drive through any Nigerian city and you’ll see them: mountains of discarded tyres behind mechanic workshops, in empty lots, and along roadsides. Nigeria generates an estimated 25 million waste tyres annually, yet globally, only 42 percent of end-of-life tyres are properly processed across 45 surveyed countries, including Nigeria. The rest become breeding grounds for mosquitoes, fuel for toxic fires, or obstacles choking drainage systems during the rainy season.
Last month in Lagos, artists displayed sculptures made from these same tyres. Twisted steel became sculptural forms, shredded rubber was reimagined through expressive 3-dimensional pieces, and vibrant artworks emerged from materials most Nigerians consider worthless. But this wasn’t just for decoration. It was a clear demonstration that waste has multiple futures, if only we’re creative enough to see them.
This exhibition wasn’t the work of a gallery. It emerged from FREEE Recycle’s Art Residency Programme, where we spent six weeks training young Nigerian artists to reimagine waste materials. And while the sculptures caught everyone’s attention, what they represented matters more. It gave us a fundamentally different way of thinking about materials, value, and possibility. Because here’s what five years of running a recycling business in Nigeria has taught me: the biggest barrier to building Africa’s circular economy isn’t technology or capital. It’s imagination.
The creativity crisis in waste management
The World Bank projects that by 2050, Nigeria will produce 107 million tonnes of solid waste annually. We’ve been trying to recycle our way out of this crisis for decades. And we’re losing. Why? Because traditional recycling operates with linear thinking applied to circular problems. A tyre gets shredded, perhaps becomes crumb rubber if the market cooperates, then often ends up in landfills when demand weakens. It’s one input, one output, and one chance at value: the same extractive model that created the waste problem in the first place.
This is the imagination deficit. We’ve been asking: “How do we dispose of waste better?” when we should be asking: “How many different futures can one discarded object enable?” Artists have always known the answer. What if manufacturing borrowed that methodology?
The Art and Science of zero waste
Five years ago, FREEE developed Integrated Recycling and Manufacturing (IRM), a system that treats every component of a waste tyre as raw material for different products. Steel wire becomes a construction material. Textile layers become industrial filters. Different rubber grades become crumb rubber for roads, sports surfaces, and playground equipment. What can’t be recycled becomes energy input.
Since 2020, this approach has processed 250,000 tyres, produced 660 metric tonnes of crumb rubber, and avoided more than 8,000 tonnes of carbon emissions. But the real shift happens when waste becomes creative material. That’s why the Art Residency is not corporate social responsibility; it is research and development. One participant, Gift Akwajie, created striking acrylic paintings and sculptural castings that drew from themes rooted in culture and history, using tyre-derived materials in ways that transcend the visual language of recycling. These artworks act as proof of concept, transforming the conversation from simply managing waste to exploring its possibilities as a new “material vocabulary”.
Africa’s circular advantage
Here’s what development economists often miss: Africa has always practised adaptive reuse. Visit any mechanic workshop in Lagos, any artisan market in Kano, any roadside vendor in Abuja—you’ll see people who’ve mastered the art of giving objects second, third, and fourth lives. The informal economy has been circular by necessity for generations.
The challenge isn’t creating circularity from scratch. It’s formalising and scaling the creativity that already exists while building the policy infrastructure to support it. According to the African Development Bank, strategic investments in the circular economy could unlock $546 billion in market opportunities and create 11 million jobs across Africa by 2030.
But to seize that opportunity, we need to stop importing European circular economy models designed for different contexts. We need African solutions built on African strengths. Strengths like our existing culture of resourcefulness, our youthful population desperate for meaningful work, and our artists who’ve always known how to make something from nothing.
Building systems that scale
During the combined Art Residency exhibition and FREEE’s anniversary celebration, Opeyemi Oriniowo from the Netherlands Consulate asked the question that should keep every policymaker awake: “How do we create more of this, more FREEE Recycles across Nigeria?” That’s not a compliment. It’s a challenge.
Nigeria can’t process 25 million annual waste tyres with one facility in Ibadan, no matter how innovative we are. Scaling requires three shifts: regulations that treat recycling as manufacturing, not disposal; investment funds designed for creative-industrial hybrids that blend culture with commerce; and embedding artists and designers into manufacturing as market creators, not marketers. Nigeria is projected to produce 30 million tonnes of carbon credits annually by 2030, potentially worth over $500 million. But we’ll only capture that value if we formalise the circular practices that already exist informally, building infrastructure that turns individual success stories into systemic change.
The circular economy Africa needs won’t be engineered top-down. It must be imagined first, then built by formalising the resourcefulness that’s always defined us. Five years ago, linking art with recycling seemed unconventional. Today, it’s obvious. Africa’s youth need jobs that don’t exist yet, built around materials we call waste. The question isn’t whether we can reimagine waste; we’ve done it for generations. It’s whether our institutions will create space for that creativity to scale.
Ifedolapo Runsewe is a trailblazer in sustainability and the Managing Director of FREEE Recycle Limited. With a background in economics and a master’s in public and international affairs, she combines business acumen with environmental expertise.
Join BusinessDay whatsapp Channel, to stay up to date
Open In Whatsapp
