Name: One woman’s mission to rethink recycling in Nigeria’s cities
Uploaded: 2026-01-13T13:34:57.324Z
Duration: 5 min 24 s
Description: Inventor Rita Idehai has built machines that pay money for plastic bottles. They’re a huge hit. Local women then turn the waste into sellable goods.

Inventor Rita Idehai has built machines that pay money for plastic bottles. They’re a huge hit. Local women then turn the waste into sellable goods.

Abuja

Rita Ideye, CEO of EcoBarter, is addressing Nigeria's waste management challenges by converting household waste into valuable products and opportunities. Her initiative involves local women in Kuje, who process single-use plastics into 'plabric' for items like bags and clothing, providing them with income while staying within their communities.

EcoBarter has also developed Africa's first locally manufactured reverse vending machines, now deployed in Abuja and Lagos, allowing users to exchange recyclables for money or utility credits. The program has expanded EcoBarter's user base significantly and is changing public perceptions about recycling, making it more inclusive and accessible.

One woman’s mission to rethink recycling in Nigeria’s cities

Every plastic bottle that you trash can either pollute our streets or create value. My name is Rita Ideye. I'm the founding CEO of EcoBarter, where we are turning waste into opportunities. So what happens to waste, especially household waste in Nigeria, is terrible. Right now, 90 percent, according to World Bank statistics, of the waste that we generate in our homes end up burnt on open dumps or disposed along drainage ways. How we manage our waste currently contributes the third largest to our greenhouse gas emission in Nigeria. Where we are is a rented property, and so we've divided the area, you know, to handle different materials. So here you have the PET plastics, over there you have the, we call them add plastics, so PP, HDPE, different types of plastic. As you can see, the broken chairs, just add plastics generally. So this is our sort of processing area. We have the baling machine that we use in compressing the plastic bottles into bales. So these are called bales. So the compressing, it makes the cost of logistics better so that we can then send them over to Lagos to the off-takers and manufacturers that use them. So the women that we work with here, you know, are mostly local community women, housewives. Some of them are widows, just, again, typically underserved women in Kuje community. So what the women do here is that they sort out the plastic bags that we collect, so pure autosaturated single-use plastic bags, process it, and weave it on traditional floor looms into fabric that we've called plabric. And then these plabrics, we make them into finished products like bags, like shoes, mats, and even more recently, clothing. Because they don't have the requisite skills, the opportunities are way limited for them. Societal norms also keep them within certain limits. So these are women that either have children, you know, are from a certain region or a certain belief, and naturally or societally, they can't even go, you know, past their community to find work. They have to be around. And our program enables them to be able to live their lives the way the society has created for them, but also then go the extra length of making income. The biggest challenge that I faced starting EcoBarter was actually knowledge. When I decided that I wanted to do this, I didn't even know who to sell the material to. I didn't know anything. I didn't understand the sales cycle. There was so much information that I didn't know, and I couldn't get online. When I did my research on the technologies that, you know, were important in recycling, there was a vending machine. I remember calling my tech friend to say, can we build this? That was the question, right? Can we build this? And him, in his stupidity, he said, of course we can build it. We've not built it before, but if it's something that is anywhere in the world, we can replicate it. And so that was how the journey started. This is a reverse vending machine. The first locally manufactured one in Nigeria, and in fact, in Africa. So when you come to this machine with your plastic or beverage can, you press on start. When you press start, then you put in your bottles one after the other, as many as you've come to the machine with. You scan the QR code, it takes you to a mobile application where you can then transfer the money that you've earned into your bank account by airtime, electricity, or data. Currently in Abuja, we have 26 of this machine, and in Lagos, we have two of these machines. People would think recycling was only for the poor, but with this machine now, like first it's neat, it's clean, it's technology, right? So everybody's interested. Prior to now, we had, I think, about 3,000 people on our platform. Now we have close to 13,000 people within one year. Honestly, I would say that just changing the narrative of who should recycle and what recycling is about is the biggest impact that this machine has made. So my hope and vision for the next generation, you know, when it comes to environmental protection and recycling, is that they see that it's everybody's responsibility, and you can start from anywhere. So knowing that from scratch, from zero, from squatting in a place, I've built something that, you know, is a sort of livelihood to this number of people, is something I'm most proud of. Knowing that this small girl built something this amazing is a pride, a thing of pride for me.

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