The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria has called for the suspension of the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency’s planned ban on single-use plastics below 80 microns, arguing that the proposed prohibition was premature, empirically unjustified, potentially devastating to industrial employment, and almost certain to fail in its stated environmental objectives based on the documented experience of countries that had tried similar approaches.
MAN Director-General Segun Ajayi-Kadir said the proposed regulation would require manufacturers to make substantial changes to production processes, machinery, and raw material inputs, rendering existing investments obsolete, increasing costs, reducing competitiveness, and exposing the plastics value chain, which he described as one of Nigeria’s largest light manufacturing sectors, to significant capital losses without delivering proportionate environmental benefits.
He cited Kenya’s 2017 plastics ban as leading to factory closures and job losses while banned products continued to circulate through smuggling, Bangladesh’s 2002 ban as remaining largely unenforced after two decades, and South Africa and India as experiencing only temporary reductions before usage rebounded. By contrast, he said Germany, South Korea, and the Netherlands had achieved high recycling rates through Extended Producer Responsibility systems that improved collection and processing without disrupting industry or raising living costs.
Ajayi-Kadir said the core problem was that NESREA was seeking to impose a new prohibition regime without first completing or even evaluating the implementation of the comprehensive Plastic Circularity Roadmap the federal government had developed in 2024 through the National Plastic Action Partnership. He said many of the roadmap’s critical recommendations, covering enhanced collection, recycling infrastructure, EPR mechanisms, circular economy initiatives, and public awareness campaigns, remained unimplemented, making it difficult to understand why the government was advancing a further restriction before testing what it had already committed to do.
