It has been a long wait, 38 years to be exact, for the Air Quality Bill to rise from the ashes of the Air Pollution Protection Act of 1966. In February lobbyists ensured that the Bill was not rushed through Parliament until specific details were properly addressed.
“We have waited so long for this Bill, we want to do this right,” said Bobby Peek of the environmental justice group, groundWork.
“The approach of passing the Bill and amending it later is likely to produce defective legislation, which is unacceptable,” said Peek.
Submissions from environmental and community groups to Gwen Mahlangu, who was then the chairperson of the portfolio committee on environment and tourism, said the Bill failed to adequately protect communities exposed to hazardous air borne chemicals.
They rejected the use of ambient air monitoring, for which no international standards exist yet.
Ambient air monitoring tests generalised air samples, but environmentalists say it doesn’t take into account climatic factors or the effects on communities not directly in the vicinity of polluting industries. And it makes it difficult to pinpoint culprits in large industrial belts.
They also contend that air pollution monitoring stations should be run by provincial and national government, not local government.
The submissions call for the Bill to control emission levels at source.
Matsheliso Tsotetsi of the Boipatong Environmental Committee, one of the organisations that objected to the Bill, said the new Act has to force industry to meet emission level standards and to be accountable to the communities affected by their pollution.
Tsotetsi has lived in Boipatong, near the Vanderbijl Park operations of steel giant Iscor, all her life.
“The people here really suffer, we get headaches, itchy eyes, respiratory problems and skin problems, and it affects everybody, young and old and especially those who are HIV-positive. The problem is that even though Iscor does engage us, up to now they haven’t implemented any of the recommendations that we have put forward,” she said.
“It is our constitutional right to live in a pollution-free environment and Iscor must take care of all the communities affected, not just the people in Boipatong,” said Tsotetsi.
Elton Fortuin, a representative of Iscor, said: “At Iscor’s Vanderbijl Park plant, the company conducted a broad-ranging assessment of environmental issues and developed a comprehensive master plan to achieve environmentally friendly operations.”
Fortuin said building a new sulphur plant in August next year will lower emission levels and reduce water usage and discharge. This is one of the company’s initiatives in an R800-million plan to clean up their act over the next three years.
Even the government acknowledges that stricter enforcement is needed. “We need to have punitive language written into the legislation so that industries do start to change,” said Gwen Mahlangu.
The Bill has been earmarked for priority attention by the new portfolio committee, which will be selected in the next few weeks. The committee will make final recommendations and adjustments to the Bill and present their findings to Parliament after which the Bill will be enacted.