lagos, Nigeria's biggest city set to use trash to generate electricity

Lagos is engulfed in waste. With a population of more than 20 million, the city has garbage that piles up on streets, outside homes and along the waterways and lagoons, creating eyesores and putrid smells. The booming city also has major electricity shortages and many residents rely on diesel generators that cloud the air with black exhaust.

Lagos is turning these problems into an advantage by starting a program to convert waste into methane gas to generate electricity. A pilot program at a local market has already shown success on a small scale. Lagos' waste management program is also organizing recycling to clean up the biggest city in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country of about 170 million people.

The project to harness waste to create power has begun at the 42-hectare (104 acre) Olusosun dump where pipes are stuck vertically into the ground to gather methane gas.

"Those will eventually fire boilers that create electricity," said Abimbola Jijoho-Ogun, general manager of administration for Lagos State Waste Management Authority as she pointed to the pipelines in about a quarter of the site.

Olusosun receives about 40 percent of the city's estimated 10,000 metric tons of garbage per day, according to the waste management department. The project aims to produce enough electricity to light the waste management site, which is open through the night.

"We aren't reinventing the wheel," said Jijoho-Ogun of Lagos' initiatives, but the city is using this as an opportunity to take advantage of its high moisture waste. About 45 percent of the garbage generated in the city is organic material.

It might seem like a small solution to a huge problem, but the project is an important step in a plan that has come a long way in the years since Ola Oresanya was appointed chief executive of the waste management program.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/03/12/nigeria-biggest-city-to-use-trash-to-generate-electricity/