Nigeria’s Plastic Crisis Has a Name, a Face, and a Child Who Should Be in School

His name is Abubakar. He is eleven years old. Every morning, before the Jimeta sun climbs high enough to make the smell unbearable, he walks to the stretch of dumped waste along the Yola-Mubi highway near Doubeli junction and begins sorting through it with his bare hands.

He is looking for plastic bottles, polythene bags, sachets, anything a recycler will pay for. He is not wearing gloves. He has not been to school in three months.

“My father is sick,” he told The Gazette News when we met him near the Doubeli bypass in Yola North Local Government Area. “I have to find money for food.”

He is not alone. Across the dumpsite that stretches from Doubeli junction toward Modibbo Adama University of Technology, boys ranging from roughly eight to thirteen years old crouch between mounds of plastic waste, paper, food remnants, and discarded Styrofoam containers, working quickly before the worst heat of the day arrives. None of them were referred to a social welfare officer this morning. None of them were stopped by an ADSEPA officer or told there is a better option. They are simply here, doing what poverty has asked of them, and the plastic just keeps arriving.

A Country Ranked and Named: The Global Evidence Is In

This is no longer a matter of impression or anecdote. Nigeria’s plastic crisis is now quantified, ranked, and published in peer-reviewed science.

A landmark study from the University of Leeds, published in Nature in September 2024, calculated the largest global inventory of plastic pollution ever assembled, using AI to model waste management across more than 50,000 municipalities worldwide. The findings confirmed Nigeria as the world’s second largest emitter of plastic pollution, releasing 3.5 million tonnes annually, behind only India’s 9.3 million tonnes.

The same University of Leeds study identified Lagos as the top plastic-polluting city of any city on earth. Nigeria is also one of two African countries in the top ten globally, with the Democratic Republic of Congo at number ten.

The study also revealed a dimension of the plastic crisis that governments have almost entirely ignored. In 2020, roughly 30 million tonnes of plastics, amounting to 57 percent of all plastic pollution, was burned in homes, on streets, and in dumpsites without any environmental controls in place. The open burning of plastic waste, the research found, comes with substantial threats to human health, including neurodevelopmental harm, reproductive damage, and birth defects.

Walk through any low-income neighbourhood in Jimeta, Yola South, Mubi, or Numan on a dry-season evening and you will see this. Small fires at the edge of compounds. Plastic sachets and nylon bags curling black in the heat. Children crouching nearby, warming themselves or simply waiting. Nobody has told them that what is in that smoke is one of the most dangerous things their growing bodies can encounter.

A major December 2025 report by The Pew Charitable Trusts and partners, Breaking the Plastic Wave 2025, found that as of 2025, 130 million tonnes of plastic pollutes the environment every year across land, air, and water. Without urgent global action, that figure will rise to 280 million tonnes by 2040, equivalent to dumping nearly a garbage truck worth of plastic waste every second.

The same report found that health impacts from plastic production and waste, including heart disease, asthma, and cancer, will increase by 75 percent by 2040, driven mainly by new polymer production and the open burning of plastic waste.

Nigeria is at the centre of both trends. It is among the world’s highest producers of unmanaged plastic. And it burns what it cannot move.

Adamawa’s Slow Emergency: Five Cities, One River, No System

Fufore is the most populated Local Government Area in Adamawa State with approximately 207,287 people, followed by Yola North with 198,247, Yola South with 194,607, Song with 192,697, and Demsa with 180,251. Together, these five LGAs alone carry close to one million people generating waste daily in a state where formal waste collection infrastructure remains severely underdeveloped.

Research published in the journal Sustainability in 2024 estimated Nigeria’s total municipal solid waste generation for 2024 at approximately 30,708 tonnes per day. Since 10 percent of collected waste is plastic, this puts the daily plastic waste stream in the thousands of tonnes, and that is only from what is formally collected.

In Adamawa, formal collection barely exists at scale. Adamawa State established the Adamawa State Environmental Protection Agency (ADSEPA) in 2021 to address the challenge of indiscriminate disposal. What that agency has achieved in the three years since its founding is difficult to assess because ADSEPA did not respond to The Gazette News’ requests for data or comment. What is visible on the ground speaks clearly enough.

The dumpsite running from Doubeli junction to Modibbo Adama University along the Yola-Mubi highway has caused numerous accidents, leading to deaths and severe injuries. A truck driver identified as Samaila said many of his colleagues have died because the dumpsite has taken half the road. “In fact, passers-by and children who pick up plastic waste to sell to recyclers have been victims of the accidents,” he said.

Umar Muhammad, a recyclable waste collector whose collection point sits roadside on the Yola-Mubi highway, acknowledged the contradiction plainly. “I make money from improper waste disposal but that doesn’t mean I support illegality,” he told HumAngle in October 2023. “Residents should amend their behaviours by re-using waste.”

He is right about behaviour. He is incomplete about cause. The behaviour did not emerge in a vacuum. It emerged in a state with no functioning door-to-door waste collection, no organised sachet water recovery system, no plastic drop-off point that most residents can access, and no financial penalty for dumping that anyone has enforced consistently.

What the River Benue Is Swallowing

Jimmy Lot of the Yola Renewal Foundation explained the link with precision. “When we carried out research, we noticed that the eyesore along the Doubeli section of the Jimeta By-pass has a linkage with the River Benue at the Jimeta axis. When it rains, flood carries the waste, including the plastic materials, into the river.”

Lot was direct about what that means for the fish and for the people who eat them. “Over time, the plastic degrades and fish feed on it. When the fish eats, it doesn’t digest in their system. The fish eventually ends up in the market, and people buy and eat it. This makes us prone to cancer,” he said. He described the situation as “particularly far-reaching because the River Benue is a long river.”

The River Benue is one of Nigeria’s two great waterways, fed from the Cameroonian highlands and flowing westward through Adamawa, Taraba, Benue, and Kogi before joining the Niger at Lokoja. What enters the river at Jimeta does not stay at Jimeta. It moves downstream, through fishing communities in Numan, past farming populations in Benue State, toward the confluence. Every piece of plastic that crosses the Doubeli bypass during the rainy season becomes part of a journey Abubakar cannot trace and that no government agency in Adamawa is currently tracking.

Peer-reviewed research on Nigerian waterways found that plastics make up a substantial portion of solid waste found in Nigerian rivers and streams, contributing up to 60 percent of the total waste volume in some regions, carried easily by wind and stormwater runoff into water bodies.

A study of Nigeria’s Osun River found as many as 22,079 pieces of microplastic per litre of water, levels exceeding those reported in 267 global studies of microplastics in river water conducted since 1994. The Benue, receiving plastic runoff from multiple settlement points across a catchment area covering parts of four states, faces equivalent contamination risk with far less scientific monitoring.

Mama Hauwa Garba has sold smoked fish from the Benue in Jimeta Market for sixteen years. She buys from fishermen who work the river near Yola. She cannot name the chemistry involved. She knows what her eyes tell her.

“The fish used to be fat and fresh smelling. Now many of them smell wrong even before I smoke them,” she told The Gazette News. “Something in that water is not right.”

She is almost certainly correct. And because she is not a scientist and does not have a title, nobody has asked her to testify about it anywhere that matters.

The Boys With Bare Hands: A Crisis Without a Registrar

Abubakar is not in any government record. No dataset formally tracks him. No child welfare officer has visited the Doubeli bypass this week. He exists in the spaces between policies, visible to anyone who walks past but invisible to any system designed to protect him.

Research documents children exactly like him with clinical precision.

A peer-reviewed study that surveyed 150 child waste pickers at the Olusosun landfill in Lagos found that most were boys aged between 13 and 17. More than half, 58.7 percent, were not attending school. They worked at the dumpsite daily and their labour was physically taxing. They reported being bitten by insects and snakes. Many suffered from chronic headaches. They earned between N500 and N1,600 per day. Children usually sorted the waste manually, with no protective equipment like gloves and face masks, in an unsheltered environment regardless of conditions. These conditions resulted in gastrointestinal illnesses, skin diseases, stings and bites from insects, and risk of being pricked by syringes, needles, surgical blades, and broken bottles.

At the Doubeli bypass in Jimeta, the hazards are the same but without even the relative organisation of an established landfill. The dump here is roadside, unenclosed, unfenced, mixed, and permanently accessible to commercial vehicle traffic passing at speed.

Thirteen-year-old Yakubu, who works the same stretch as Abubakar, told The Gazette News he attended primary school in Yola South until five months ago. He stopped when his mother could no longer afford the incidentals. His younger brother, nine, sometimes comes with him on weekends.

“He learns from me what to pick,” Yakubu said. “The clear bottles are more money. The nylon bags they give small money.”

A 2024 study of Nigeria’s urban areas found elevated blood lead levels in children living near informal plastic waste recycling facilities, highlighting the disproportionate vulnerability of younger populations. Lead exposure in children causes irreversible neurological damage, affecting cognitive development, learning abilities, and behaviour.

The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health journal published findings in September 2025 that go even further. Chemicals used to produce plastics contribute to chronic conditions in multiple organ systems and disrupt hormone function, with exposure to plastic-derived toxins associated with adverse birth outcomes, metabolic conditions, neurodevelopmental disease and disability, and reproductive conditions. Children face an urgent threat in the form of hazards posed by plastics in the environment.

The children sorting plastic at Doubeli are not just exposed to physical hazard. They are absorbing, through skin contact, inhalation, and hand-to-mouth behaviour, a chemical load that science increasingly links to damage that will not show in a school grade or a clinic visit for months or years. By the time the damage is legible, Abubakar will be an adult. The system that failed him will still be in place. And another eight-year-old will be at the dump.

A 2025 paper on the public health consequences of open burning found that “indoor air pollution from burning plastics leads to elevated risks of respiratory infections, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and other life-threatening conditions.” Similar studies found contaminated eggs and food chain contamination near plastic and waste burning sites in Nigeria.

Section 28(1)(a) of Nigeria’s Child Rights Act makes the use of a child for forced or exploitative labour a criminal offence punishable with a fine or imprisonment. In the informal sector of urban areas, Nigeria’s government has not made serious efforts to enforce this law to protect children.

The boys at Doubeli have never heard of this Act. Neither, apparently, has anyone with authority in Adamawa State who could enforce it.

The Policies That Exist, and the Gap Between Paper and Ground

Nigeria has passed and announced policy, and that matters. The question is the distance between announcement and reality.

In June 2024, the Federal Government implemented restrictions on single-use plastics within government institutions, ministries, departments, and agencies following a Federal Executive Council meeting presided over by President Bola Tinubu. Lagos State’s ban on Styrofoam food containers, announced in January 2024, moved into full enforcement from July 2025, with the Lagos Environmental Sanitation Corps seizing 2.5 million naira worth of banned plastics in enforcement sweeps across Agege, Oshodi, Idunmota, Mushin, Victoria Island, and Lekki.

Those are real actions. They are also largely Lagos actions.

In Jimeta, on a Tuesday morning in March 2026, Styrofoam food containers are still being used at every food vendor stall visited by The Gazette News along the Doubeli stretch. Sachets are still being torn and discarded in the open. There are no enforcement agents. There are no signboards. There is no evidence that the national single-use plastic policy has reached this particular stretch of the Yola-Mubi highway in any operational sense.

Nigeria has had a law banning single-use plastics in development since 2013. It has still not been fully promulgated at the national level. Twelve years after a bill was first drafted, the enforcement that has begun in Lagos has not yet been replicated in Adamawa, in Kano, in Gombe, or in dozens of states where plastic accumulates in rivers and on roadsides with complete impunity.

Professor Temitope Sogbanmu, Senior Lecturer in Ecotoxicology at the University of Lagos and member of the Nigeria National Plastic Action Partnership Metrics Task Force, has consistently stated what honest enforcement requires. “Potable water needs to be provided by the government at accessible and affordable prices as an alternative to sachet and plastic bottled water,” she wrote in a published analysis. “Strategic stakeholder engagement for monitoring, advocacy and buy-in is also key.”

She is describing an integrated response. What Nigeria currently has is a Lagos response. The rest of the country, including Adamawa and its most populated communities, is waiting.

The World Failed to Act. And Nigeria Was in the Room.

While boys like Abubakar sorted plastic on a roadside dump in Jimeta, diplomats from 184 nations gathered in Geneva in August 2025 to finalise what was supposed to be history’s first legally binding global treaty on plastic pollution.

The resumed fifth session of negotiations, referred to as INC-5.2, gathered more than 2,600 participants at the UN’s Palais des Nations in Geneva. Despite intensive engagement, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee was unable to reach consensus. UN Secretary-General António Guterres expressed deep regret, saying negotiations had concluded without achieving consensus.

The talks failed for a specific reason that must be named. The deadlock pitted a small group of leading petrochemical nations, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States, against more than 100 countries seeking mandatory production cuts. As of the final days, the working text contained nearly 1,500 brackets marking disagreements, five times more than after the previous failed round in Busan, South Korea in December 2024.

Analysis published at the commencement of the August 2025 negotiations found that at least 234 fossil fuel and chemical industry lobbyists had registered to participate in the INC-5.2 talks.

A Nigerian voice was heard in the room. Leslie Adogame, Executive Director of Nigerian environmental think tank SRADeV and part of the International Pollutants Elimination Network, said from Geneva: “So far, the INC negotiation process is broken. We are currently in damage-control mode. We risk having a meaningless treaty without any binding global rules like bans and phase-outs.”

After the August 2025 collapse, the INC chair resigned. A one-day resumed session, INC-5.3, convened on 7 February 2026 solely to elect a new chair. No substantive negotiations were held. As of now, a date for the next round of negotiations has yet to be determined.

This is the global context inside which Abubakar wakes up every morning and walks to his dump. The world’s richest nations and their oil industry allies have now blocked a global plastic treaty twice. The countries that generated the least plastic per capita, countries like Nigeria in parts of this data, bear the heaviest physical consequences. Dr Costas Velis, research leader of the University of Leeds study, said the findings demonstrate that access to waste collection should be seen as a basic necessity and a vital aspect of sanitation, alongside water and sewerage. “We shouldn’t put the blame on the Global South,” he said. “It’s just a lack of resources and ability of governments to provide the necessary services.”

The Pew report confirms that research has conservatively estimated the annual costs of health effects from plastic chemicals alone at as high as US$1.5 trillion globally. That figure will only grow as plastic production, use and pollution increase.

Nigeria is not paying that cost in conference rooms. It is paying it in the bodies of children sorting plastic on roadsides in Adamawa State.

What Should Happen, Starting Now

The evidence points not to despair but to specific, implementable actions at every level.

At the federal level, the national single-use plastic ban must become operational in every state, not just Lagos. ADSEPA and its equivalents in every state must receive the budget, staffing, and authority to enforce it. Producer responsibility legislation must be enacted, requiring the companies that sell billions of plastic-packaged goods in Nigeria to fund the recovery of that packaging. Between 1996 and 2014 alone, more than 23.4 million tonnes of plastics entered the Nigerian technosphere, with less than 12 percent recycled. The manufacturers of that plastic profited. Communities from Adamawa to Bayelsa absorbed the cost.

At the state level in Adamawa, the communities most affected already know what is needed. Jimmy Lot of the Yola Renewal Foundation has been leading NGO-funded clean-ups of the Doubeli dumpsite and recovering plastic before it reaches the Benue. The Foundation’s work shows that community-level intervention is possible. But NGOs should not be the last line of defence between a river and a landfill.

For the children, the solution has never been complicated. Abubakar does not need a think tank to find it. He needs his father to be healthy enough to work. He needs a school that does not require fees he cannot pay. He needs a state government that treats his presence at a roadside dump as an emergency, not as invisible background.

The Pew Breaking the Plastic Wave 2025 report is explicit, “Informal workers such as waste pickers, who can play a vital role in the solution, must not be left behind.” That language refers to adults. For children, the bar is higher. They should not be in the solution at all. They should be in school, entirely removed from a waste economy they had no role in creating.

At seven in the morning, Abubakar fills his torn sack. He has found eleven bottles, a tangle of nylon sachets, and a piece of Styrofoam large enough that the recycler might take it separately. He does not know what his earnings will be today. It depends on what the collector is buying. Some days it is N400. Some days it is nothing.

He does not know that in Geneva last August, diplomats from 184 nations argued for two weeks and failed to agree even on a definition of plastic pollution. He does not know that 234 oil and chemical industry lobbyists attended those talks. He does not know that the world produced more than 460 million tonnes of plastic this year, and that his country released 3.5 million tonnes of it into the environment.

He knows the smell of a dumpsite at dawn. He knows which bottles fetch more. He knows that if he is still here when school reopens, he will not be there.

That is enough knowledge for one eleven-year-old to carry. More than enough.