South Africa is to publish regulations this year to prohibit the use of asbestos, according to Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk.
Speaking at his department’s budget vote in Parliament on Monday, Van Schalkwyk said that in terms of amendments to the Environmental Conservation Act recently signed into law by President Thabo Mbeki, government was now empowered to control products even before they become waste.
”We will therefore be publishing regulations this year to prohibit the use of asbestos,” he told MPs. ”We know that it is because of old roads, old mines and cheap construction, especially in our poorest communities, that this airborne threat hands like a cloud over our families,” he said.
But the department noted that there would not be a campaign to strip housing of asbestos roofing, for example. The experience of other countries, like Germany, was that this created more of a pollution problem than before as the danger lay for humans when the asbestos was broken.
Van Schalkwyk noted that ”for certain products where no current alternatives are available, we will allow for a three- to five-year phasing-out period”.
Van Schalkwyk also told journalists at a media briefing ahead of his department’s budget vote that a revived Air Quality Bill will be tabled by the end of July. He said it will be processed by Parliament after its mid-year recess which will provide ”a long term” breath of fresh air to hotspots in South Africa.
He said there were a number of hotspots where people lived downwind from polluting factors and for whom winter was a difficult time. These areas included the Milnerton area in Cape Town, Durban South and areas of the Highveld, in particular Sasolburg.
He told Parliamentarians that his department had studied the public comment on the Bill — which was not processed by Parliament before the last election and has had to be revived through the sanction of the new Parliament. The department would be proposing amendments to strengthen the legislation.
”The Bill will pave the way for establishing a comprehensive Air Quality Management System in South Africa,” he said. ”It will establish a scientific basis for identifying our most polluted air and our most guilty polluters.
”It will create air quality standards and regulate emissions. Most importantly it will provide teeth for environmental protection, empowering all spheres of government to act against those whose greed and carelessness attacks the very air we breathe,” he said.
He predicted that once the Bill became an Act it would reduce emissions and rapidly bring air quality ”in all identified pollution hotspots under control”.
Provincial and local air quality officers would be appointed ”and our sons and daughters will no longer need to grow up under the impression that brown and grey is the natural colour of our South African skyline”. – I-Net Bridge