Project Revive: Coca-Cola’s efforts to enhance Nigeria’s environmental sustainability
“Time is running out”… This is a statement that anyone who has closely followed conversations about climate change must have read in the news for at least the past decade.
For years, the terms ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ have been the subjects of many panel discussions at global events, as world leaders seek to drive home the dangerous challenge the world faces due to a variety of human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels, poor plastic waste disposal, and some aspects of farming operations while highlighting practices to salvage the situation. While many individuals and corporations have stepped up to the challenge, recent developments still indicate a need for more intensified efforts.
A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change puts the dire situation of the earth into perspective. The report, which showed just how close we are to reaching the internationally-agreed threshold of global heating, highlighted the fact that in 2019 alone, ‘atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations were higher than it has been in at least 2 million years’.
In Nigeria, for instance, the effect of climate change is seen in the increased rates of flooding, changes in rainfall patterns, drought, heat-waves, desert encroachment and erosion. According to the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), in 2019, approximately 1.9 million people had been displaced by flooding. In addition to these displacements, flooded farmlands have reduced crop yield in some areas of the country, leading to high rates of food scarcity further complicated by droughts in other parts of the country. These issues have health, financial and social effects, and the country’s waste problem only adds an extra layer of difficulty.
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Annually, Nigeria generates about 2.5millon tons of plastic waste, with Lagos contributing around 2,250 tons daily. Most of these waste materials end up in sewers, beaches and rivers, and the little that is collected ends up in landfills where they are incinerated or mostly buried. These two widely practised processes add carbon particles to the air, thus leaving very little confusion about the direct role we have to play to curb this attack on our planet.
With the latest climate change report projecting bleaker insights than ever, it is evident that governments, world leaders, and corporate organisations need to unite against this common issue. Coca-Cola has been one of the most direct organisations in its approach to tackling the effects of climate change. With the World Without Waste initiative launched in 2018, the company announced its commitment to collect and recycle a bottle or can for every one it sells by 2030. Since then, Coca-Cola has partnered with and supported local NGOs to develop and implement numerous projects, to drive environmental sustainability while providing support to the target communities.
Back in September 2020, just as Nigeria was recovering from the effects of the lockdowns imposed by the government to fight the spread of the coronavirus, Coca-Cola Nigeria launched an initiative that fully portrayed its strategy to make the world and Nigeria’s environment more sustainable. The initiative, titled ‘Project Revive’, was launched as a recycling campaign in partnership with RecyclePoints, a Lagos-based social enterprise, to inspire people in different communities around Lagos to dispose of recyclables from their homes or neighbourhoods at designated points, where they could be easily collected and processed.
Given the economic hardship most communities were facing at the time, the project added an extra layer of incentive, by offering monetary rewards for plastic wastes which were properly collected and deposited, thereby creating jobs for some women and youths in the communities where the reward scheme was implemented.
It is important to note that in the last quarter of 2020, Nigeria’s female unemployment rate increased to 35.2%, with overall youth unemployment reaching an all-time high of 53.4%. For perspective, these numbers were at 7.45% and 17.69% respectively at the end of 2019, thereby showing just how keenly most communities in Nigeria needed an economic empowerment intervention.
Starting with one collection point in Ikoyi that served the communities around the area, Project Revive has ensured the employment of at least 660 women and youths, with over ₦6million generated as income for communities collecting and exchanging their plastic waste. The project has also successfully established recycling banks in eight Lagos communities, namely: Ikeja, Orile, Igando, Festac, Shomolu, Victoria Island, Sangotedo and Ojo. Across these communities, a staggering 158.60 tons of recyclables have been collected and recycled.
These milestones echo the remarks of Coca-Cola Nigeria’s Public Affairs, Communications & Sustainability Director, Nwamaka Onyemelukwe, at the launch of Project Revive, in which she mentioned that ‘we all have a collective responsibility of keeping our environment clean and promoting a sustainable environment’. The project’s success has been largely due to the support of community stakeholders, right from its launch period when it quickly attracted over 75 registrants who subscribed to deposit kilograms of plastic bottles to earn recycling points and rewards.
Given the impact recorded by Project Revive in just a year and the milestones from other partnerships Coca-Cola has established in Nigeria, it is evident that the company is on the right path to fighting a multi-faceted challenge like climate change.