During the pandemic, everyone was forced to sit at home with a lot of time on their hands. That whole situation became a time for forced reflection of the deficits of societies. World economies proved fragile and people were forced to rethink what was important.

This is what forced Ayodeji Balogun, Managing Director of Amsquare Global Resources Limited to come up with an idea on how he could add value by both empowering and simultaneously improving an already fragile global ecosystem,
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The answer to his quest for a solution came with recycling. With his job in the Sanitation Services Department of the Lagos State Ministry of Environment which oversees LAWMA – Lagos State Waste Management Authority, he knows first hand the challenges of waste management in the state of Lagos, and how that broadly replicates itself across the country. In his capacity at role, he undertook a UN Waste Cities Tool Training project which earned him a certification with the global body but further exposed him to the worldwide effects of poor waste management on people and the climate.

As he continued to interact with stakeholders to develop a viable solution, he found out one thing; there are many companies, established and continuously emerging, that are poised to tackle the issue by inserting themselves in the value chain by plugging into existing government systems: for Example, most companies align themselves with LAWMA to pick up waste from neighborhoods via compactors which they then deliver to LAWMA managed dump sites where hundreds of scavengers daily recover what they can and resell to other recyclers – a second part of the value chain before the waste materials are then moved to factories.

Not only is this process inefficient but a lot of waste is lost or rendered useless by this process, it’s also more expensive and consuming. If product consumers could be educated to separate their waste and that waste, by category, could be picked up by the specific recycling companies directly, this will preserve the quality of the recycled waste and will make sorting at the factories easier while also speeding up the process; at the same time, scavengers could be reassigned from dump sites to more lucrative sorting jobs at those same factories.

This is what gave birth to his company Amsquare Global Resources Limited, and with plants in Ijebu, Ibadan, Ibafo and Lagos, this low cost, end to end efficient form of waste collection and processing has led to a fast rise and expansion of operations in less than a year of operation with over 1000 metric tonnes of plastic waste recovered and processed, the only question that remains is how fast these process can be adopted and scaled across Nigeria and Africa as a whole.
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