SMART CITIES
Environmental Douw Steyn, director: Sustainability at Plastics SA pollution poses one of the greatest threats to all forms of life on the planet. IMIESA speaks to Douw Steyn, director: Sustainability at Plastics SA, about the organisation’s role in promoting responsible waste management and recycling.
MUNICIPALITIES NEED TO LIFT THEIR WASTE GAME How is Plastics SA contributing to urban sustainability? DS Sustainability is one of the pillars of Plastics SA. We support and contribute to resource efficiency activities for our industry that impact aspects such as energy use, water usage and air quality. We also facilitate numerous projects such as recycling initiatives and clean-up campaigns for entrepreneurs and communities. Education and training initiatives form an important component. Is a ban on single-use plastics one of the solutions? No, there is no ‘silver bullet’ that will solve South Africa’s waste crisis. Banning singleuse plastics is, in our opinion, not the right approach to follow, although we do agree that we need to eliminate all unnecessary packaging (regardless of the material) and to reuse where possible. When used and disposed of responsibly, plastics have a major role to play in ensuring a more sustainable world. Unfortunately, South Africa’s current waste collection and recycling system is broken: 34% of households in South Africa still do not have access to formal waste collection, while 64% of recyclables still come from landfill and other post-consumer sources.
34
IMIESA June 2022
In other words, there’s little to no formal separation-at-source. As a result, waste that could have been collected and recycled is either sent to landfill or ends up in the environment, where it becomes dirty and contaminated. Recyclers therefore have to invest in expensive wash plants to clean the material collected. Communities must become more serious about diverting waste from landfill and allow recyclers access to post-consumer waste streams if we are to improve our recycling rates and grow our circular economies. Our European counterparts have shown us that this is only possible if recyclables are removed from the waste stream as early as possible to ensure they retain their value. We need an effective separation-atsource system across South Africa in all municipalities to prevent valuable waste from being sent to landfill or, worse yet, ending up in our rivers or oceans because there is no effective waste management system in place. How is the EPR implementation progressing? We believe that government’s introduction of mandatory extended producer
responsibility (EPR) under Section 18 of the National Environmental Management: Waste Act (No. 59 of 2008), which came into effect in South Africa on 5 May 2021, is a major step forward in the right direction. EPR means that producers of packaged goods are responsible for not only health and safety issues associated with their products, but also the management of their post-consumer packaging waste, including collection, sorting and recycling. These policy objectives include changes for both upstream (e.g. design for recycling) and downstream (e.g. plans for increased collection and higher overall rates of recycling) aspects, which we are optimistic will soon begin to bear fruit in South Africa and have a significant impact on the amount of packaging waste that is collected and effectively recycled. It will therefore definitely have a positive impact on sustainability, as more funding will be generated to address plastics collection, improve sorting (where recycling facilities are already in place) and introduce separation-at-source mechanisms. This will result in cleaner and bigger volumes of recyclables that will be collected, as well as growing awareness about the correct way to dispose of waste
