Atunlo Sustech: The master in  waste treatment, converting rubbish to financial commodities

In our 2025 list of Nigeria’s Most Transformative Companies, Atunlo is an unexpected inclusion. The company collects plastic bottles. How is that transformative?

To the Chief Operating Officer, Ayo Ogunlowo, the question is welcome. He had answered it before, and is ready and willing to answer it again.

“Collecting plastic bottles is not the innovation,” he says, with the ease of someone who means it. “The innovation is in building a system around it that is measurable, accountable, and sustainable.”

His answer shows that framing and structure, not activity, form the lens through which everything Atunlo does becomes legible. He said the company did not invent plastic recovery, but introduced verification, consistency, and data into a process that had long operated without any of those things. And in doing so, it changed what the activity and the challenge had been.

Initial challenges

Across Lagos and Nigeria’s major urban centres, plastic waste accumulates with predictable persistence. Informal collectors move across the landscape, gathering what others discard. The system then offered little reliability. Quantities were estimated, payments vary, and effort had no assurance of fair return.

Tackling the challenges

Atunlo’s intervention begins at this point of friction. Materials brought to collection points are weighed and verified. Payment is tied to confirmed quantities. The result is consistency. Consistency, as Ogunlowo explains, changes the nature of participation entirely.

That reliability has drawn approximately 8,500 collectors into Atunlo’s ecosystem. As of 2025, the company had distributed over $1 million across that network – earnings generated by verified recovery, not charity.

On the average, collectors have received around $118 cumulatively, though participation levels vary considerably.

For many, the income began as supplemental, between $10 and $30 per week, providing meaningful support for daily household expenses. For a growing number, it has become more than that. Some aggregators and hub operators now earn between $150 and $300 per month, with several running what function, in practice, as small enterprises.

“These are not payouts in the charitable sense. They are payments for value,” Ogunlowo is careful to note.

The distinction matters to him. Recovered plastics serve as feedstock for industries that depend on a consistent, verified supply. Atunlo organises that flow, aggregates the materials, and connects the supply to downstream buyers. The $1 million distributed represents value circulating within a functioning economic system, not money exiting it.

In case you want to know more about the man behind the Atunlo feats, a little more will be told here about the man before the celebration of the Atunla feats continues.

Ayo Ogunlowo is the man. He is the COO of Atunlo Sustech, he is an operational strategist bridging the gap between high finance and the circular economy.

A former banker with Access Bank, Ayo has transitioned from managing multi-million dollar corporate portfolios to building one of Nigeria’s most significant climate-tech engines: Atunlo.

The Climate-Tech Scale (By the Numbers): Ayo’s leadership at Atunlo is defined by a data-driven approach to sustainability, moving the needle on Nigeria’s environmental goals through massive operational scale:

• Resource Recovery: Oversaw the recycling of over 120 million plastic bottles, diverting them from landfills and oceans.
• Economic Impact: Directed the disbursement of N1 billion in exchange for waste, providing a critical liquidity injection into the informal economy and the bottom of the pyramid.
• Job Creation: Successfully built a network that has created over 10,000 direct and indirect jobs, institutionalising a massive, previously unstructured workforce.
• Carbon Mitigation: Achieved a reduction of 9,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions, contributing directly to Nigeria’s climate resilience.
• Advocacy: Led a sensitisation movement that has reached over one million people on sustainable waste practices.

Ecosystem Funding: Beyond operations, Ayo is actively funding the next generation of eco-innovators. He recently committed N3,000,000 through the Atunlo Green Earth Business Grant, providing non-equity funding to start-ups solving critical environmental challenges.

The “Atunlo” Business Model: Drawing on his background as a founder of fintech platforms PennyTree and Treegar, Ayo treats waste as a financial commodity. His work is a masterclass in unit economics, proving that climate action can be a profitable, high-velocity business model in Africa’s most complex markets.

Ayo is a vocal advocate for Neurodivergent Leadership. He frequently writes on the “non-linear” thinking required to build in Africa’s chaotic markets, challenging traditional management theory.

He is a proponent of the “Fail Fast” methodology, openly teaching how Atunlo pivoted from early cash-burn to profitability.

Atunla other solutions

As Atunlo’s recovery operations matured, a broader gap became difficult to ignore. Environmental activity without measurement struggles to translate into anything beyond itself. It cannot inform policy. It cannot attract climate investment. It cannot be held accountable to a standard.

This led to the development of CarbonScope360.

The platform focuses on emissions and impact measurement, helping organisations convert real operational activity into structured environmental data. The connection to waste management is less intuitive than it first appears, but Ogunlowo is direct about it.

“There is a gap between what happens on the ground and what gets recognised in climate systems,” he says. “Measurement is how that gap is closed.”

When plastic waste is left unmanaged, burned, dumped, or left to clog drainage channels, emissions outcomes deteriorate. When it is recovered and properly processed, that changes. Structured recovery systems create the conditions under which environmental impact can be quantified.

Ogunlowo is careful to avoid overclaiming. Not every recovered bottle becomes a carbon credit. That is not the assertion. The assertion is that structured, verified environmental activity creates the foundation upon which climate accountability can be built, and that without measurement infrastructure, that foundation does not exist.

“The risk is building systems that extract data without strengthening local participation.”

That concern is not abstract for Ogunlowo. He has written critically about the trust deficit in African carbon markets, where environmental work is carried out locally and value is captured elsewhere. It is a pattern he is conscious of replicating.

His response is structural. By enabling environmental activity to be measured at the source, participants gain visibility into the value they are creating. Local actors are not simply inputs into a system, they become informed participants in it.

“Our goal is to ensure that those creating environmental value are not invisible within the system, but recognised participants in it.”

Building for Nigeria

Atunlo’s platforms depend on digital tracking, payments, and logistics in a country where power supply and connectivity are inconsistent. Ogunlowo treats this not as a unique obstacle, but as a design constraint to be respected.

Digital participation already exists at scale across banking, commerce, and communication in Nigeria. Users engage when connectivity is available. Systems log data in accessible windows. Continuous uptime is not assumed, because it is not realistic.

“Technology here does not need perfection to work,” he says. “It needs alignment with how people actually interact.”

The approach is less a concession to infrastructure limitations than a recognition that effective technology is designed for its operating environment, not for an idealised version of it.

A career built on systems

Ogunlowo’s path to climate technology is not a straight one. He built Gateway Shield for the Ogun State Police Command — a security intelligence platform for digital policing. He consulted on digital transformation for Access Bank. He co-founded Omora at the intersection of blockchain and traditional finance.

The variety can appear scattered from the outside. Ogunlowo sees a consistent thread running through all of it.

“All of them deal with systems that shape everyday outcomes: safety, access, trust, accountability,” he says. “Climate technology is a continuation of that same mission.”

In that reading, Atunlo and CarbonScope360 are not departures from his earlier work. They are its extension into a domain where the stakes are higher, and the measurement infrastructure is, in most of Nigeria, still missing.

Execution scale

Atunlo has recovered over 130 million bottles. Against Nigeria’s total plastic waste volume, Ogunlowo acknowledges plainly, that is well under one per cent of the national problem.

He does not reach for a consoling context. He states the figure and moves to what it means.

“We are not solving the entire problem,” he says. “What we are demonstrating is execution.”

That distinction between aspiration and execution recurs throughout his thinking. Scale, in Atunlo’s terms, is not defined by targets announced. It is defined by operational durability: the ability to expand into more communities, maintain buyer relationships, sustain quality, and preserve the trust of participants as volumes grow.

In a challenge of national magnitude, contribution is measured not only by coverage but by reliability. A system that works consistently at a modest scale demonstrates something that an aspiration at maximum scale does not.

Beyond the company

Through the Atunlo Foundation, the company supports other climate-tech entrepreneurs, including those working in adjacent areas of waste, energy, and environmental data. The decision is strategic as much as it is principled.

“Climate challenges are systemic,” Ogunlowo explains. “No single organisation can address them in isolation.”

Strengthening the broader ecosystem expands collective capacity, accelerates learning across initiatives, and increases the likelihood of durable solutions rather than singular ones. It is, in Ogunlowo’s framing, how leadership is expressed not through dominance but through contribution.

What success will look like

Looking ahead five years, Ogunlowo does not measure success by company metrics alone. He describes something more diffuse and, in some ways, more demanding.

Climate accountability would feel practical rather than abstract. Organisations would understand their environmental footprint and factor it into decisions. Informal environmental efforts would connect more clearly to structured opportunity. At a national level, climate conversations would shift from aspiration to execution, supported by measurement infrastructure and informed participation.

That vision, notably, is not about Atunlo being everywhere. It is about the conditions Atunlo is working to create, becoming normal.

“Climate moves from aspiration to execution,” he says. “Nigeria participates in global climate markets from a position of strength.”

That framing helps to explain why Atunlo’s innovation can appear ordinary at first glance. It is not defined by novelty, but by discipline: the ability to organise what already exists into systems that can be trusted, scaled, and sustained.

And in a context where so much environmental effort remains informal, unrecorded, and unrecognised, building systems that work quietly and consistently may be the most consequential innovation of all.