There is no night or day in Ghana’s infamous e-waste graveyard Agbogbloshie. Hundreds of unofficial e-waste pickers scour its sprawling terrain to extract components that contain copper, cobalt, lithium and other precious metals. If it has a circuit board or battery, it is fair game. These components fetch a decent price on the black market, where demand is high.
Africa has an e-waste problem. Collection and recycling are mostly controlled by informal actors who often lack knowledge of the health and environmental dangers posed by improper handling.
Hussein Apeh, supervisor and operations officer at Hinckley Recycling, a Nigerian e-waste recycler, said informal pickers are swift and persistent.
“They remove what they think is valuable, then discard the rest in dumpsites, including damaged batteries that can leak or ignite,” he told Dialogue Earth.
The consequences can be grave. Toxic fumes are released when plastics are burned, and heavy metals seep into the surrounding soil and water.
A recent VoxDev study revealed that infant mortality rose by 10% for babies born within 10 kilometres of Ghana’s Agbogbloshie and Nigeria’s Olusosun dumpsites, while respiratory illnesses are widespread.
According to the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), Africa generates about 3.5 million metric tonnes of e-waste annually. Although small in comparison to Asia’s 30 million metric tonnes, less than 1% of Africa’s e-waste is formally collected and safely recycled. The remainder feeds an informal economy marked by makeshift, often dangerous recycling practices.
The continent’s shift toward a green transition and its embrace of e-mobility risk worsening this crisis. Africa’s electric vehicle (EV) market is growing rapidly, projected to reach USD 17.41 billion this year and expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.2%, hitting USD 28.3 billion by 2030. Local EV manufacturing and the proliferation of e-bike startups are accelerating battery usage, just as solar and other renewable energy installations gain traction. Africa’s battery market is forecast to reach USD 4.97 billion this year and grow to USD 6.82 billion by 2030.
Without a coordinated approach to battery disposal, the progress of electrification could leave a toxic legacy. But experts argue that with the right policies and investment in battery reuse and recycling, the continent could turn a looming threat into an economic opportunity.
Solomon Onuchukwu, an analytical chemist and enumerator at Nigeria’s E-waste Producer Responsibility Organization (EPRON), said the repurposing of used batteries could significantly reduce energy storage costs for renewable energy installations.
“There’s at least 70 to 80% capacity in second-life batteries, and they can be repurposed for solar storage and backup power systems,” Onuchukwu noted.
Collins Owuor, a renewable-energy specialist at the East African Center of Excellence for Renewable Energy and Efficiency (EACREE), echoed this point.
“If the capacity is there, it will be possible to extend the life of various decommissioned batteries,” he told Dialogue Earth.
“And then enable them to serve longer or repurpose them for other uses like supporting e-mobility in 3-wheelers (keke/tuk-tuk/rickshaw) and 2-wheelers (okada/bodaboda).”
Currently, a handful of pioneering ventures across Africa are demonstrating how homegrown, scalable recycling models can meet the challenge. Hinckley Recycling in Nigeria, SLS Energy in Rwanda, and Cwenga Lib in South Africa are three examples of companies attempting to build sustainable, safe systems for battery recovery.
Cleaning up battery waste legally and at scale in Nigeria
Last year, Hinckley Recycling announced the launch of a USD 5 million lithium-ion battery recycling facility in Ogun State, Nigeria. Though the plant is still scaling up to full operation, the company has already begun repurposing usable battery cells into modular power packs for mini-grids.
“First, we test them to separate the good cells from the bad ones,” Apeh explained.
“The good cells are repurposed into power packs [for mini-grids], while batteries that reach their end-of-life [bad cells] are collected and sent to our partners outside Nigeria for material recovery.” Metals like lithium, nickel and cobalt are extracted from these exhausted batteries.
“Instead of mining virgin materials from the earth, we do what is called urban mining,” Apeh said, referring to materials extraction from e-waste.
In 2024, Hinckley processed around 10,000 individual lithium-ion batteries and exported 25 tonnes of battery waste for recycling. These figures are expected to rise significantly once the new facility reaches capacity.
Hinckley’s power packs are built in partnership with Aceleron Energy, a UK-based firm, and incorporate a compression technology that allows individual cells to be replaced, extending their life span.
A persistent challenge in Nigeria is the lack of formal battery collection centres.
“At the moment, the burden of rightfully disposing batteries lies with the consumer,” said Owuor. He added that incentivised collection programmes would help strengthen recycling value chains. Hinckley is attempting to do just that by operating over five collection centres across the country.
The company sources used batteries primarily from telecom operators and solar home system providers.
“We work closely with IHS Towers, which powers telecom towers across Nigeria,” Apeh said.
“They use a lot of batteries for backup power, and when those go bad, they send them to us.”
Hinckley is also relying on policy enforcement. Nigeria’s National Environmental (Battery Control) Regulations, 2024, are designed to support the rollout of extended producer responsibility (EPR) programmes. Such programmes aim to make the recycling of products a duty of their manufacturers.
Apeh believes enforcement will help build awareness, formalise collection, and scale battery-recycling efforts nationwide.
A community-based approach to battery recycling in South Africa
In South Africa, Cwenga Lib is pursuing a decentralised model for lithium-ion battery recycling that emphasises safety and modularity. Rather than build large-scale plants, the company is deploying compact facilities that can be situated in communities across the continent.
“At the core of our process is safety and local adaptability,” said Lesego Siwela, Cwenga’s project lead.
“We use food-grade reagents, no high heat, and no pressure-based systems. That means our technology can run in a small community in Mauritius just as well as it does here in South Africa.”
Developed from purification research conducted at the University of the Western Cape, Cwenga’s ion-exchange process extracts key metals without generating harmful secondary waste. “We’ve built a clean chemistry process that works in a containerised, decentralised facility,” Ed Hardwick, Cwenga’s founder, shared. “That means we don’t need to ship batteries across borders, or invest hundreds of millions in a huge, dangerous plant. We want this to be Africa’s own answer to the battery-waste problem.”
Cwenga receives only 10-15% of formally collected waste in South Africa (which is around 4% of the country’s total waste). By using modular units, the company aims to minimise transport costs and ensure scalability. “We can place small facilities closer to collection zones instead of shipping waste across countries to one huge plant,” said Siwela.
A major barrier remains battery literacy
“People aren’t sorting their e-waste,” noted Jenny Falconer, Cwenga’s technical lead. “Many don’t know batteries are hazardous and when labels don’t indicate battery chemistry, you can’t even tell what’s safe to handle or not.”
South Africa’s 2021 EPR policy mandates that battery producers take back their products at end-of-life. Cwenga is one of the only companies operating under this framework and successfully turning lithium-ion waste into reusable materials.
“Our model is still young, but it’s working,” said Falconer. “We’re showing that battery recycling doesn’t have to mean industrial risk or toxic runoff. It can be clean, decentralised, and community-run.”
Cwenga currently doesn’t directly handle the repurposing of used batteries. It works closely with upstream partners who do. These partners test and extract viable cells from spent batteries, often from e-mobility or solar power systems, and assemble them into power solutions for backup systems, clinics, or rural mini-grids. Only once those batteries are fully exhausted do they arrive at Cwenga’s plant for processing. There they are able to extract cobalt oxide, which is sold to ceramics and pottery makers, and nickel carbonate, which goes into glassmaking and industrial catalysts.
From e-mobility to community power in Rwanda
SLS Energy is a Rwanda-based firm founded by renewable-energy engineer Léandre Berwa. It is repurposing lithium-ion batteries from electric motorcycles and solar systems into modular power packs. SLS power packs now serve telecom towers, rural health centres, and refugee camps.
Berwa noticed that batteries used in two-wheelers with battery-swapping systems reached the end of their life far faster – sometimes in as little as three years – despite still retaining up to 70% of their storage capacity. “I saw that they weren’t dead,” he stated. “They just weren’t fit for their original purpose anymore. But they could still be really valuable in new roles.”
SLS is also targeting use cases on farms. In partnership with agricultural initiatives like One Acre Fund, its battery packs now support the company’s “irrigation-as-a-service” offering, where farmers are provided with on-demand access to water delivery systems, so they can grow crops more efficiently. With SLS’s battery packs, it is able to dispatch mobile, solar-charged units daily to smallholder farms growing crops, often for export. “The electric pumps reduce the farmers’ reliance on diesel,” said Berwa. “And they can share the system between plots, which lowers cost.”
Each battery is tested with proprietary software, matched by chemistry and age, and tagged with a QR code that tracks its deployment and performance.
Africa can’t afford to mine minerals, export batteries, and then throw them away
“The biggest safety risks come from human error or mismatch,” Berwa told Dialogue Earth. “But we carefully address both through traceability and smart configuration.”
In 2023, SLS helped divert more than 100 tonnes of battery waste from landfills. The company is now expanding into Nigeria and Kenya, where partnerships with Hinckley and other stakeholders are already in place.
“EVs are scaling, and with that comes battery retirement,” Berwa said.
“If we don’t have local reuse solutions, we’re just shifting the waste problem.”
Like Cwenga and Hinckley, Berwa sees the work SLS does as economic justice. “Africa can’t afford to mine minerals, export batteries, and then throw them away,” he stressed.
“We need to keep those resources on the continent, powering our homes, our businesses, and our growth.”
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