A 10-year-old girl from Alexandra in Johannesburg died at the weekend from what the Gauteng health department called “a foodborne illness". (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
Drive along the lush tree-lined streets of any suburb in Johannesburg and you would not be surprised to find out that the city is the largest man-made urban forest in the world. The jacarandas that form a royal purple archway down old white suburbia are a famous representation of the city’s natural beauty.
Drive along the N1 towards Pretoria and you have a view of Johannesburg’s skyline: a modern metropolis lavishly dotted with trees, both indigenous and exotic. As you exit on Grayston Drive and turn right you are now heading towards Alexandra township with its own entirely different identity: a world within a world, an economically disenfranchised enclave that has its own culture, moves at its own pace and even breaths different air; a dangerously toxic mix of dioxins and heavy metal particles
Infamous for its high levels of crime and violence, Alexandra has an air of ungovernability and, as is the case in most low income previously oppressed communities, no one, least of all its residents, can do anything about it.
Almost all around the borders of Alexandra scrapyards invite an army of men and women who scour the city for scrap metals, which they collect in large trolleys to be exchanged for cash. A disturbing element of this phenomenon is the vandalism of public infrastructure such as Eskom, Transnet and Prasa for high value copper cable, which hits the economy. This has resulted in police raiding scrapyards, and a six-month ban on the export of copper.
What has seldom been reported is that the copper wire is burned to strip it of its outer protective layer, which releases into the environment toxins such as heavy metal particles, dioxins and other chemicals called furans. This burning takes place just outside or in the scrapyards, often just across the street from formal homes and informal settlements.
The thick grey, sometimes black smoke does not have far to travel before it is inhaled by thousands of people. It is difficult to quantify the potential hazard to human health of burning copper wire because it depends on various factors, including the concentration in air of this pollutant, according to a relative risk assessment of the open burning of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) published in the National Journal of Medicine. But the results of simulated open burning of various forms of WEEE showed that emissions from insulated copper wire were exceptionally high.
“Almost all around the borders of Alexandra scrapyards invite an army of men and women who scour the city for scrap metals, which they collect in large trolleys to be exchanged for cash”
An older Alex resident was quoted as saying that every time the burning starts he has difficulty breathing, that the smoke penetrates closed doors and windows and makes his chest feel tight.
Three decades after the end of apartheid, Alexandra’s residents remain economically marginalised and are subject to an oppression so invasive that it could potentially be shortening their lifespans.
A progress report by The Lancet Commission titled Pollution and Health, reports that ambient air pollution was responsible for 4∙5 million premature deaths globally in 2019. The report continues on to say that despite science-based recommendations for action against pollution there has been “strikingly little effort in most countries to act on these recommendations or to prioritise action against pollution”, that instead ministries of health continue to prioritise infectious diseases and disease treatment.
This we saw when the South African government brought the country to a standstill in an attempt to halt the spread of the Covid-19 virus, which was proven to pose a greater risk to people who have comorbidities.
Prolonged inhalation of dirty air is known to increase the risk of acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is deadly and a cause of Covid-19-related deaths, as well as other respiratory and heart problems. Various studies have linked high levels of Covid-19 mortality to cities that are highly polluted. Researchers analysing 120 cities in China found a significant relationship between air pollution and Covid-19 infection, and of the coronavirus deaths across 66 regions in Italy, Spain, France and Germany, 78% of them occurred in five of the most polluted regions
In South Africa the intersections of race and socio-economic status make it so that if you are black and poor you are more likely to live in an area where you are exposed to dangerously high levels of pollution, and therefore have a higher risk of premature death if you are exposed to the coronavirus. Statistics have shown that black South Africans admitted to hospital with the coronavirus were 1.3 times more likely to die than white people.
The trauma of township life is to confront daily the violence and assault to human dignity. A clean environment is a constitutionally recognised right in South Africa and a declaration of the United Nations. Although the government has taken steps to control the problem of scrap metal collectors for the sake of the economy, the very real threat to the lives of our country’s most disenfranchised is an element which deserves just as much attention.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.