Jul 31st, 2026
On Thursday 30th July 2026, the International Round Table on Auto Recycling (IRT) will host a timely webinar – “Auto Recycling in Africa.”
Across much of Africa, vehicle recycling still happens almost entirely outside formal systems, with end-of-life vehicles dismantled informally and hulks abandoned for lack of shredding plants, authorized treatment centres and enforcement.
Free to attend, this 60-minute session brings together two contributors with deep, hands-on experience of the continent’s recycling landscape, from West African policy development to three decades running a parts-reuse business on the ground in South Africa.
Dr Kemjika Ajoku, former head of industry division at the ECOWAS Commission, will open the session with findings from his current baseline study on the environmental management of end-of-life vehicle recycling in Nigeria, research that is being used as a pilot for a wider West African recycling strategy.
Over more than two decades at ECOWAS, Ajoku managed major regional programmes including the West African Common Industrial Policy with UNIDO and the ECOWAS Automotive Industry Policy Framework funded by the African Development Bank. He will set out the scale of Nigeria’s informal sector, why existing ELV regulation has failed to translate into enforcement, and the economic case, backed by Afreximbank’s billion-dollar automotive industry fund, for building formal recycling infrastructure across the region.
Following Ajoku, John Hunt, founder of Sparesboyz, will bring the perspective of someone who has spent more than 30 years building a specialist used-parts business from the ground up in South Africa. A pioneer of the country’s automotive recycling industry, Hunt has played a key role in promoting environmentally responsible processing and higher recycling standards, and is a vocal advocate for professionalising South Africa’s end-of-life vehicle sector. He will discuss what proper end-of-life vehicle management looks like in practice, the regulatory and enforcement gaps holding the market back, and what it will take to close them.
Together, the two speakers offer a rare side-by-side view of Africa’s recycling challenge, one rooted in regional policy and pilot research, the other in decades of frontline commercial experience, and what a genuinely formal, professionalized recycling sector could look like across the continent.
This webinar is a chance to understand a market that is rarely covered in depth: the scale of the opportunity, the barriers to formalization, and how international recyclers, insurers and technology providers might play a role as the sector develops.
