R72-million later and Delmas’s

The town is failing to fix pollution, and oil, fats and grease from factories aren’t helping

Standing on the highest hill in Delmas, you can see the modern story of Mpumalanga playing out in every direction. A mix of dust and haze fades out the horizon and washes up into the light grey sky of a spring day.

The dust comes from coal mines. Their waste dumps create oddly straight lines on the near horizon. Double-trailer trucks roar between these and Eskom’s coal-fired power stations, which are clustered in this western part of the province. The tar roads are rutted and the surfaces broken as a result of the weight of these trucks. Kilometre-long dust clouds follow the trucks that take shortcuts along gravel roads.

The landscape is still coloured in a palette of faded pastels, as the area waits for the first sustained rains of the planting season. Between the mines, grain silos and chicken farms, potato and maize fields wait for seeds to be sown. These have been ploughed — neat furrows of torn-up, blood-red earth waiting in anticipation.

With little rain, the only green is at the bottom of each valley, where invasive tree species thrive in the rivers that flow from Mpumalanga. Their water brings life to the province’s farms, residential areas and industry, and eventually spills into the Indian Ocean, 500km away.

For Delmas, the water and its proximity to Johannesburg is why it exists. Farmers can grow vegetables and raise chickens, which are then packaged and sent to the shop shelves of the metro.

The highest hill in town looms over the largest of the factories involved in this process — McCain Foods. It is surrounded by a 4m wall. A stream of trucks overloaded with potatoes feeds the factory. Black and white smoke rises from it.

McCain is one of many mediumsized factories in Delmas. These release a mixture of waste, which ranges from polluted air to bloody bags of animal waste, as well as raw sewage.

Delmas has a wastewater treatment plant, across the road and downhill from McCain. Another plant treats waste from Botleng, the apartheid-era township built 2km away.

Both plants are in the middle of a R72-million upgrade. The Mail & Guardian reported last year on the effect of untreated waste from the Botleng plant, with so much flowing into the Bronkhorstspruit Dam, 20km away, that it had turned green.

In this part of the world, many dams are green, overloaded with nutrients from sewage and clogged with water hyacinth. In response to the M&G’s questions for that article, the Victor Khanye district munici-