Visionscape Invites SDGsACT to her Land fill Site

To celebrate the World Water Day, Cleaner Lagos Initiative invited different NGOs working on environment sustainability and media personnel for a tour at Visionscape Eco park Landfill site at Epe.

The tour to Visionscape Landfill site as facilitated by Cleaner Lagos Initiative on 28 March 2018, we left Ajigidingbi Primary School, Ikeja at 9:30 am and arrived at the venue at 12:30 pm. The tour guide did brief introduction, Mr. Ashaolu Joel, the HSE officer for Visionscape gave out BPE materials and gave safety procedure to follow during the tour.

Mr. Sumeep Singh, the operation manager for Visionscape explained the process of weighing the waste collected at the dumpsite and how the tons of waste collected are calculated. Mr. Joel further explained the mode of operation of the landfill site. The site has received 80, 000 tons of waste in the last 6 months; the land size is 80 hectares and started operating as a dumpsite since 2009 with no records of waste dumped at the site since 2009.

The site operates 24/7 but the major challenge is that Visionscape just took over, work is still in progress to structure the landfill site to best practice, so the waste dumped at the site are not separated. Average of 350 scavengers work on the dumpsite everyday separating the recyclable materials and sell them to companies who recycle them. They are registered with Visionscape but not working directly with Visionscape.

Mr. Kunle Akala, the tour guide from CLI project explained more about the how Visionscape won the bid to take care of domestic waste and black-spot in Lagos as stated in the MOU signed with the State. Due to court, case between Lagos State and PSP delayed their operation, which affected the operation of Visionscape; the company started operation officially in January 2018 and have been working 24/7. The company had to take up the waste collection of the whole state instead of black-spot as signed in the MOU due to the disengagement of the PSP by Lagos State government. The transfer-loading stations has been rebuild. Many of the PSP company has been recalled to commenced commercial waste collection e-waste, medical waste while Visionscape focus on domestic waste.

Questions, suggestion and recommendation came from NGOs, stakeholders’ and media personnel who were on tour. The future of the present dumpsite is projected to be an engineering landfill site in near future and the waste at the landfill will be use to generate energy.