South Africa busy drowning in a sea of waste

Not enough plastic entering waste stream in SA is recycled, writes

in Centurion.

Johan van den Berg

Delegates to the Adaptation Futures conference in Cape Town last month heard that by 2050, more than 800 million people worldwide will be left vulnerable by coastal flooding and rising sea levels.

Of those, 650 million living in cities like Cape Town will be at risk of water shortages due to climate change, research by C40 Cities, the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy and the Urban Climate Change Research Network has revealed.

The impact of waste and especially plastics on the environment should not be discounted from this conversation.

According to the United Nations, the driver behind 2018’s World Environment Day theme, Beat Plastic Pollution, is the world’s overreliance on plastic, which poses serious consequences for the environment and human health.

In South Africa in 2016, only 42% of the 1.1 million tons of plastic that entered the waste stream was recycled, according to statistics issued by Plastics SA.

Although this marked an increase of 35% from 2011, there is still some way to go before we can judge our efforts sufficient to begin turning the tide on waste.

If one considers that 90% of SA’s waste is disposed of at landfill sites and that this amounts to 98 million tons of waste deposited across 826 landfills each year, then it is time for all of us – business, industry and society – to start thinking differently.

Internationally, global drivers like pollution, climate change and resource scarcity have resulted in the development of a number of sustainable alternatives to waste disposal and here in South Africa.

These opportunities for innovative solutions remain to be explored.