Solid waste management in Nigeria is a social and public health concern. Waste problems are more serious in cities as the communities lead a non-indigenous lifestyle with respect to resource consumption and wastage. Nigerian municipal waste has organic biodegradables 50 to 70%, hard plastics/ plastic film 15 to 20%, metal scrap 10% and others mixed such as glass, ash, batteries, etc. depending on the culture, occupation, and other community activities. The waste generated (0.5 to 0.7 kg/capita), has a density of about 250kg/m3, wet, and often mixed with non-biodegradables and hazardous components. Itinerary waste collectors parade the dumping yards for scavenging recyclable components in the waste which have a value. State and local governments tried various methods of disposal e.g. communal dustbins, house to house collection, curbside collection, private sector participation, open dumping and incineration. None of these methods yielded sustainable results, rather, cities became dirtier. We introduced waste segregation, buy back and recycling activities in selected communities in Ibadan and Lagos and developed a “Competing Demand Model”. Here, when we add value to a particular component of the waste, that component will reduce or disappear from the waste stream. The generator will take adequate care to segregate such components and keep aside for economic gains. We introduced waste to wealth schemes, e.g. fertilizer from market and abattoir wastes, ferrous and non-ferrous metal recycling, paper, conversion of hard and film plastics and pet bottles into industrial feedstock. Communities started looking at these as a way of earning extra income. For this model to succeed, government, private entrepreneur or an individual may act as drivers and initiate community based small or medium scale entrepreneurship (e.g. recycling industry or collection kiosks) and pay some money in exchange for the resource, waste. This model yielded encouraging results with significant reduction of metals, paper and certain types of plastics from the waste stream with youth employment opportunities.