In Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, the accumulation of waste at hundreds of illegal garbage dumps in the city appears to be endless. It flushes out plastic and other garbage in waterways and beaches, poses numerous health hazards, increases the risk of flooding and increases the risk of threatening the livelihoods of fishermen in the country. Outdoor burning of waste also releases a variety of harmful gases.
At the same time, Sierra Leone's power supply is extremely vulnerable. Only 21% of households have access to power from the grid. As the country's hydroelectric power plants struggle to generate electricity during the dry season, even the few who have connections enjoy only patch-like access. The government can barely afford to buy alternative supplies from floating power plants run by Turkish company Karpowership.
The problem of too much waste and not enough electricity appears to have an obvious solution. It is the production of electricity by burning waste.
Infrastructure developer Infinitum Energy aims to do this accurately in Freetown. We hope to begin work at the 30 MW waste to energy facility later this year. It is designed to generate electricity by incinerating 365,000 tons of waste per year.
“The big impact is reliability,” says Lindsay Nagle, CEO of Infinitum. “We're adding 40% of electricity to the grid,” he told African businesses, saying that waste-to-energy facilities provide baseload power rather than intermittent supply from solar panels.
Infinitum aims to operate the facility by the second half of 2027. However, not everyone is convinced that energy from waste represents a good solution for Africa. And despite many plans on drawing, advances so far have been very limited to make waste-to-energy energy a reality on the African continent.
A “monologic” opportunity?
Energy from waste is far from new technologies. Many European countries have been generating energy by burning waste for decades. In Sweden, 52% of the waste is incinerated, generating energy in both heat and electricity. Another 47% is recycled, and only 1% is sent to landfills. (ii)
However, Africa only welcomed the first modern waste-to-energy infrastructure in 2018, when the Leppy facility opened in Addis Ababa.
Like Sierra Leone, several other African countries are also investigating waste-to-energy projects. In Lagos, for example, the state government signed a contract with the Dutch company Harvest Waste Consortium last year to develop a waste-to-energy facility with capacity of up to 75 MW. The state government has also signed a memorandum of understanding with the cement giant Lafage to use waste as raw materials at one of its production facilities.
Nagle believes Africa is ripe for exploiting the benefits of technology. “We know how waste to energy works,” he says.
However, he acknowledges some challenges. Nagle says “in an ideal world,” but says that all the waste in Freetown will be decoupled from the dump site towards the incineration facility, but he admits that this won't happen overnight. He says he only collects about 20-30% of the city's waste. The rest is simply unofficially abandoned. Infinitum plans to pay the nominal amount to collect waste to Freetown residents. Nagle hopes that once the factory starts to work, the collection rate will be 60%, bringing collection rates to 80-90% within five years.
When this raw material is sent to a waste-to-energy facility, the electricity generated at the plant is sold to the state-owned utility, the Power Distribution and Supply Agency, under a currently established power purchase agreement.
Nagle adds that there is a “monologic” possibility to expand energy from waste in other African cities.
“If I had my own way, we try to guide two or three of these into development at different stages each year,” he says. “It's going to be a laundry, rinsing, repetitive business model.”
A fiery question
Despite the obvious benefits of removing waste while generating much needed electricity, many groups are vehemently opposed to the incineration of waste.
“It's not efficient, it's expensive, it's not economically viable and it's contaminated,” says Weyinmi Okotie, a clean energy activist at the nonprofit Gaia Africa. He adds that waste to energy plants release “cocktails of substances that are harmful to the environment.”
One of the problems is that technology “doesn't meant to be Africa in the first place,” Okotie argues. He says the incinerator is designed to deal with “dry waste.” This constitutes a huge amount of waste in European countries where energy from waste is widespread. However, in most African countries, waste is dominated by organic materials that do not burn well.
He warns that Addis Ababa's Leppy facility has encountered many operational difficulties and is far below planned capacity. Local media reported earlier this month that the city administration is facing compensation bills from utility, Ethiopia's electricity, after failing to meet its waste delivery quota. (iii)
Okotie reserves his greatest anger due to the argument that waste to energy is the source of green power. “It's one of the biggest lies I've ever heard in my life,” he says. “Is the combustion of plastics burning fossil fuels a renewable source of energy? That's crazy.”
This question is a matter of intense debate around the world. Waste-to-energy advocates argue that diverting waste from landfills can help reduce the emissions of methane, one of the most harmful greenhouse gases. Critics responded that there is a better way to deal with organic waste that releases methane, pointing to data that burning plastics can release as much carbon footprint as coal burning.
Darron Johnson, Africa's regional director for Climate Fund Managers, an investment group that helps fund Infinitum's projects in Freetown, claims that it can at least reduce emissions.
“The Freetown Project implements circulating fluidized bed technology and significantly reduces pollutant emissions compared to traditional incineration methods. The technology is designed to fully comply with EU emission standards,” he says. “Continuous emissions monitoring is in place to ensure compliance with these standards.”
Nagle also argues that modern waste to energy to energy improves Freetown significantly. “The current situation is just scary,” he says, pointing to a series of health and environmental impacts that arise from the city's current lack of proper waste management infrastructure.
The discussion of the benefits of waste to energy indicates that there are few indications that it will be resolved. What is clear, however, is that Africa faces increasingly serious problems if forecasts about the increase in plastic use turn out to be accurate.
An OECD study published in 2022 estimates that plastic use will increase by 6.5 times by 2060 in sub-Saharan Africa (IV).
In this regard, Okotie welcomes efforts to reduce single-use plastics, including the ban in place in Lagos State. “Around 30 years ago, we had a great economy and a beautiful lifestyle without so many single-use plastics,” he says. “First of all, we need to reduce the amount of plastic we're producing.”
