Anyone who’s been to Sweden will tell you it’s clean, so clean that waste is imported. The Swedes don’t just bin their litter, the state is also tough on waste.
For South Africans, grasping this attitude to waste can be difficult. For us waste moves from house to landfill and then it is someone else’s dirty little problem.
But Sweden sees land as a resource to be protected and waste as one to be exploited. Since 2000 the country has increased landfill taxes, banned combustible and organic waste from landfills and emphasised recycling.
Swedes sort their waste into categories. Most of it is recycled, the rest is composted, incinerated or subjected to anaerobic digestion. The energy produced heats homes and generates electricity.
The strategy works, maybe too well. Sweden has so little waste it imports it from neighboring countries. South Africa on the other hand does not lack waste, but it clearly wastes what it has, especially when it comes to recycling and energy recovery.
The City of Cape Town says waste-to-landfill amounts increase by 7% annually even though the net population increase is only 2% over the same period.
Stan Jewaskiewitz, vice-president of the Institute of Waste Management of Southern Africa, says Johannesburg is in ”dire straits”.
”They’re running out of landfill space and they’re seriously looking to recycling as the panacea to the waste problem.”
Municipalities do not see recycling as their function. Private companies offer recycling services, usually on a small scale as ”dirty MRFs” (material recovery facilities).
Waste is transported to the facilities then separated into recyclables and non-recyclables. The problem is that certain types of waste — for example paper, which is often contaminated by other household waste — need to be cleaned at a higher cost.
”It’s not an ideal situation but unfortunately that’s what we’re facing,” says Jewaskiewitz, who believes it will be a long time before South Africans start separating at home.
But people are trying. In 2007 the City of Cape Town ran a waste-separation pilot project for costing purposes, covering 130 000 households. Residents were asked to split their wet and dry waste, with non-recyclables including food waste and other organic material going into black bags, and recyclables such as metal, glass, packaging and cardboard going into clear ones.
Cape Town’s head of integrated waste management strategy and policy, Barry Coetzee, says the response was mixed. There was greater compliance in more affluent areas and less in middle-class ones. In poor areas the recycling scheme did not take hold, yet hardly any recyclable material found its way into household waste. Coetzee believes this is because individuals from such areas re-use recyclables or take them to recycling facilities for compensation.
But most of what goes to South African landfills is industrial waste. ”South Africa’s landfill fees are way too cheap,” says Coetzee. At about R100 a ton, it makes financial sense for private companies to continue dumping waste at landfills. Compared with Sweden, where companies pay about R530 a landfill ton, this is a pittance.
Coetzee says that recycling is not just government’s concern but also the responsibility of the private sector.
The Department of Environmental Affairs and tourism is working with large companies to form voluntary agreements on the disposal of waste. To some extent, it is working.
Although there is no legislation on where consumers should dispose of e-waste (electronic waste), large companies are coming together to offer customers options for returning hazardous waste such as old electronics or used light bulbs.
With insufficient legislation and a lack of political will, our landfills remain untapped resources. Once waste has made its way to landfills, it simply rots there.
”Traditionally those who manage waste are not used to making money from it,” says Steve Thorne, director of the sustainable development organisation SouthSouthNorth Africa. He says that many people have yet to see the linkages between climate, energy and development.
But though Cape Town and Johannesburg are exploring ways to mine the wealth buried in their landfills, the eThekwini Municipality in Durban has already started. Through its Landfill-to-Gas project, the municipality extracts naturally occurring methane and CO2 gas from landfills.
At the Mariannhill and Bisasar Road landfills the gas generates up to 10MW of electricity, which is then fed into the municipal electricity grid. The municipality is awaiting registration with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change so it can sell off its carbon credits.
Such developments are encouraging but South Africa is still not creative enough about using waste.
Although nobody is suggesting a Swedish-style strategy in South Africa, perhaps it is time the authorities took a more proactive approach. After all, it’s not every day that commercial and environmental interests converge.