“Today is significant to us as a business. Not because of our commercial footprint in this historical city, but because of the hope that this initiative brings to youth and communities across the country.”
By Uzor Odigbo
Sweep Foundation has lunched Green Campus Project in Ibadan designed to ensure that Nigerian university campuses are rid of plastics wastes.
The Coca-Cola foundation provided a grant to support SWEEP Foundation, on their ‘Green Campus Project’, designed to facilitate the implementation of a comprehensive waste management program across selected university campuses in Nigeria.
The pilot phase of the project will collaborate with select higher educational institutions in Nigeria.
The project will provide waste and environmental education, establish university campus community drop-off points and recycling hubs, while simultaneously providing an additional income stream for the campus community youth who participate in the program.
The implementation of this waste reduction scheme will facilitate the deployment of key infrastructures and mobile collection receptacles across participating institutions in the country.
Overall, this program will help accelerate and improve collection of discarded plastic bottles (PET) leveraging targeted awareness programs on campus community recycling.
The Green Campus Project is schedule to flag off in the following universities- University of Ibadan, University of Benin, University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus, University of Port-Harcourt and Obafemi Awolowo University. And will focus on galvanizing support for more sustainable means of dealing with packaging waste through cost effective aggregation models.
It also aspires to eliminate waste incineration, a common practice in many institutions in Nigeria.
The project will support 250 students with training, logistic, PPE and other incentives in each campus-based recycling and waste collection hub as they volunteer the various drop-off centers.
Amb. Phillips Obuesi, President, SWEEP Foundation, while speaking during the launch of the project at the University of Ibadan, reiterated the impact of the programme on the selected universities and surrounding communities saying, “University campuses suffer from indiscriminate waste disposal habits of its staff and students, mostly occasioned by low level awareness and inadequate infrastructures to support proper waste management across these campuses.
Tertiary institutions as change agents in society play a central role in supporting students to forge more sustainable habits that are necessary to tackle plastic pollution. The Green Campus Project is therefore strategically positioned to lead the charge in these universities”.
Mrs. Nwamaka Onyemelukwe, Director, Public Affairs, Communications and Sustainability (PACS), Coca-Cola Company, also at the event said, “Today is significant to us as a business. Not because of our commercial footprint in this historical city, but because of the hope that this initiative brings to youth and communities across the country.
“We understand how important it is to protect and preserve our natural ecosystem resources through intentional sustainable action, which we must all commit to, and that is why this initiative, the Green Campus Project, funded by The Coca-Cola Foundation, is being launched today in Nigeria’s premier University.
“We are proud to flag off this program here, to advance our efforts towards environmental sustainability and along with this objective, also, facilitate wealth creation for our youth, leveraging our under-utilized waste value chain.
“The Green Campus Project connects fundamentally with two of our critical success levers and sustainability priority points which focus on supporting ecosystem resilience through proper packaging waste management and building socio-economic resilience through economic empowerment activation in local communities. We do hope that youth in and around Ibadan will adequately benefit from it.
“In the next few weeks, we will roll out The Green Campus Project in more campuses, expanding hopefully, what will not only be a revolutionary approach to community waste management, but also a trigger to socio-economic recovery across Nigeria.”
Speaking on this project, the president of The Coca-Cola Foundation, Saadia Madsbjerg, said, “We recognize that student communities are critical stakeholders in our broad strategy to preserve and protect our ecosystem. We are proud to support this initiative which will not only improve the waste value chain of campuses in Nigeria but will also help inspire an entire generation of environmental advocates”.