From a distance Shadrack Monkhe bears an uncanny resemblance to the Collect-a-Can man seen in the recycling organisation’s advertisements. At the edge of a road in Vanderbijlpark, he pushes a wheelbarrow heaped to capacity with littered beverage containers.
Even the setting is appropriate. Behind him sprawls the steel mill of ArcelorMittal, the main shareholder of Collect-a-Can, which makes the rolls of steel that become cans. Next door is the can factory of Nampak, Collect-a-Can’s other owner. And around the corner is a purchasing depot of Collect-a-Can itself.
But Monkhe walks past a flattened Coke can to pull two plastic bottles out of the long grass. He has not picked up a single steel can today, though he has seen many. A scrap dealer will pay him R1,80 per kilogram for his plastic bottles. Collect-a-Can buys cans for just 53c a kilogram. He knows where the Collect-a-Can depot is, but in three years of collecting a variety of recyclables, Monkhe has not been there.
Despite its sterling reputation, a changing world is rapidly rendering Collect-a-Can meaningless to recycling in South Africa. Rising prices for other commodities have made the trade in paper, cardboard, plastic, aluminium and scrap steel more lucrative.
Hawkers who still pick up cans increasingly take them to private scrap merchants not associated with Collect-a-Can, because dealers will offer them up to double the price paid by the “non-profit” recycler. Collect-a-Can was once the only buyer of cans in Southern Africa, but today it handles fewer than half of all recycled tins. This stark fact calls into question most of the statistics that the company propagates, claiming the reduction of roadside litter and the high overall recycling rate of cans.
Indeed, few people who have visited Collect-a-Can’s website, seen their advertisements in glossy wildlife magazines or read one of the many flattering articles about their accomplishments would imagine the reality of how the company operates. Not a single drink can has passed through Collect-a-Can and back into Mittal’s steel to make new cans. Today most of them are exported to Pakistan.
The contrast between perception and reality is not lost on scrap dealers. Says the owner of a major Gauteng recycling company: “Scrap dealers are crooks in everybody’s eyes, but I do more volume than they [Collect-a-Can] do and I don’t have any awards. I pay a rand and they pay 53 cents, so who’s a crook?”
Sitting in his expansive office at Collect-a-Can’s Kyalami headquarters, MD Funani Mojono seems perplexed when told that his company pays just 53c a kilogram for cans. More accustomed to dealing in tons and container loads, he argues, “53 cents a kilogram? No. Can’t be. It’s very low.” Only a cellphone call to a colleague settles the matter.
It’s not surprising that the price seems low. Since January 2004 Collect-a-Can’s price for loose cans delivered to it by hawkers has risen just 32%, not even keeping up with bread prices. The company’s website claims “collectors are paid higher prices than the reigning steel price”, but over this period the scrap steel price has more than doubled as demand for steel has surged.
Collect-a-Can’s finances have also improved. Despite lower beverage can volumes, Mojono says that better export prices have cut the subsidy paid by Mittal and Nampak from about $30-million in 2000 to $2,7-million last year. Since Collect-a-Can spends $7-million on advertising alone, it’s fair to say that the sponsoring companies do not subsidise the prices paid for cans at all. In fact, if the entire promotion budget had instead been devoted to subsidising prices for collected beverage cans, the price would have risen from 53c to 86c a kilogram.
Mojono says Collect-a-Can’s “sole purpose is to make sure that a can doesn’t end up being a nuisance or litter”. He quotes the same figures used in its advertisements, that it has reduced can litter from 8% of the total to less than 0,5%. “On the roads there’s nothing,” says Mojono, “no cans.”
But Nick Kock, who was MD of Collect-a-Can from its founding in 1993 until 2005, says that the only litter surveys conducted for Collect-a-Can were made by Keep South Africa Beautiful, an organisation that disappeared more than a decade ago. And its figures never showed can litter as low as 0,5%.
It’s obvious to anyone who walks the streets of South Africa that more than one in 200 pieces of litter is a can. When I counted litter on streets adjacent to Collect-a-Can’s main buying depot in Johannesburg, cans made up 6% of the total. Questioned about this, Mojono replies: “Cans by the side of the road can’t be Collect-a-Can’s fault.”
Equally questionable are Collect-a-Can’s recent figures for the total recovery rate of cans. In the Nineties calculating a recovery rate was as simple as dividing the number of cans accumulated by Collect-a-Can by the number of cans sold on the market. This figure rose rapidly in the first five years of the company, before stabilising at just over 60% at the end of the decade.
Since 2003, however, private scrap merchants have found it attractive to buy and sell cans independently of Collect-a-Can. So the company has supplemented its own data with information gathered from scrap dealers and steel mills to come up with a can recovery rate for Southern Africa. Regional manager Thys Oosthuizen calls this number-crunching “a tough job”. One scrap dealer calls it “a thumb-suck; I can’t even tell you what my percentage is in cans and I’m here seven days a week”.
Throughout this period the official recovery rate has been steadily rising, to an improbably precise figure of 67,5%. Mojono says that any missing data means that “the figure should be a lot higher”. The recovery rate is externally audited, but Collect-a-Can did not respond to several requests for a copy of the auditor’s report. It did provide a chart showing the company had handled 16 251 tons of used drink cans in 2006, which would account for just 20% to 30% of the 2,5-billion cans sold that year.
Whatever the actual recovery rate, Mojono might be correct that it puts South Africa among the top 10 countries in the world for steel beverage can recycling. But there are few competitors left in this category. The vast majority of drink cans worldwide are made from aluminium.
This metal is inherently more valuable and more recyclable than the tin-plated steel used by Nampak for the South African market. At most scrap dealers, indeed at Collect-a-Can itself, a kilogram of aluminium cans — usually imports such as Amstel or Red Bull — fetches a price at least 11 times the rate for steel cans.
So even a recovery rate of 67,5% looks rather rusty next to the 94% of aluminium cans sold in Brazil that return for recycling. Muna Lakhani, national coordinator for the Institute for Zero Waste in Africa, says that when aluminium drink cans were manufactured in South Africa in the mid-Nineties, “in a very short period of time we had a very high percentage of cans collected”, without any industry subsidy. It is probably not a coincidence that Collect-a-Can was formed in 1993, just months after the first aluminium can factory in South Africa was announced.
A walk around Collect-a-Can’s detinning plant in Vanderbijlpark suggests that the steel beverage can’s recyclability might be oversold. A two-storey high pile of can-making scrap and food tins waits to be baled and dunked in a 22-hour hot bath of caustic chemicals, to remove the tin plating that protects cans from rust. The tin is recovered and sold and the steel is cleaned for remelting in Mittal’s nearby furnaces.
A somewhat smaller heap of beverage cans awaits a different fate. Mittal will not buy the cans because of their tin content, but their aluminium tops would react with the detinning chemicals to form explosive hydrogen. So these are macerated into pellets and then compacted into 4kg cylindrical “briquettes”, used in a Botswana mine smelter to process cobalt.
The facility’s manager, Quenton Potgieter, says most of the cans used for the 5 000 tons of briquettes he produces a year also come from Botswana. The bizarre economics of this round-trip work because “we purchase so cheap in Botswana and we get a good price on the briquettes.”
Most of the drink cans bought by Collect-a-Can in South Africa will be shipped to steel mills in Pakistan, which tolerate greater quantities of tin in their steel. They pay R1,15 per kilogram of cans leaving the gate. Mojono explains: “We get better prices for cans internationally, that offsets our costs; and that’s just a clever way of doing it, because we don’t want to do this as a charity.”
As long as Mojono’s company is not willing to pay a premium price, the question in the mind of private recyclers is whether Collect-a-Can needs to be doing this at all.
Don Boroughs operates the www.greenerhouse.co.za website