Plastic surgery
Forced recycling gives SA a lift
All plastic can be recycled, right? Wrong. Many foods are packaged in thin polyethylene terephthalate, more commonly known as PET, the type of plastic that crackles when you handle it. It is not recyclable and can remain in the environment for decades.
“People don’t realise that we can recycle most plastic, even clingwrap, but those muffin holders and some other polystyrene and plastic food packages are not recyclable. There isn’t a facility in SA that handles it,” said Jaco Botha, operations manager for Phambili waste management services.
Albi Modise, spokesperson for the department of environmental affairs, said that only about 10.8% of SA’s waste was being recycled by households. The rest is done by the informal sector, or not at all.
Landfill sites, where all the unsorted rubbish goes, are quickly filling up.
“Landfills around the country are running out of space,” said Botha. “We will have to find alternative sites, which will cost all of us more money.”
In Gauteng, the smallest and most populated province, “it is anticipated that by 2022 there will be no landfill space left”, said Modise.
Despite this, only 13% of urban households in Gauteng sort their waste for recycling.
Recycling rates are dismal everywhere: 1% in Limpopo, 6% in KwaZulu-Natal and 20% in the Western Cape.
Since mandatory at-source sorting of recyclable items was introduced in the greater Johannesburg area on July 1, the process has been outsourced to private companies, including Phambili.
Pikitup spokesperson Muzi Mkhwanazi said of Johannesburg residents’ efforts that it was “still too early to furnish statistics around the uptake, but there is keen interest in the project”.
Johannesburg councillor Nico de Jager, who announced the initiative on World Environment Day, said residents would not initially be penalised for failing to sort their recyclable rubbish, but it may cost those who don’t separate waste in the future.
For my granddaughter’s future
Jerry Mohanlall, a retiree whose blue recycling bag sits in a vintage black rubber bin from 1978, made sure his complex in Vorna Valley was on the Phambili truck route and that residents received their bags to separate waste at home.
“I used to have a bag for paper, which was collected on a Wednesday, but I had to take bottles and cans to a recycling bin nearby. Now we can throw everything into the blue bag and it’s picked up. It’s about time, isn’t it? It is not for my future, but for my granddaughter’s,” said Mohanlall.
There has been debate about the actual environmental benefit of recycling, the high cost of the new venture and that it takes a bit of work, but according to Botha the costs are recoverable if the city sells the material for recycling, and the truth is that there aren’t many options left in a growing metropolis.
In Midrand, said Botha, residents had taken to “sorting at source” with enthusiasm. The project was tested last year on about 20,000 households.
“There was a door-to-door education and awareness campaign, where we talked to the community about what recycling is and how to do it,” said Botha.
“Now, 48,764 households receive their bags. In July, we picked up 257 tons of [sorted recyclable] waste. About 80% of that has been recycled.”
Packaging from takeaways and ready-made foods tends to fall low on the recycling scale. Fat can contaminate cardboard boxes and makes polystyrene unrecyclable.
Plastic bottles are better, as is evident from their mass presence in Phambili logistics manager Mpho Boshomane’s trucks. Boshomane, who moved to Midrand from Polokwane, said he knew only of paper recycling before joining the project.
“I came here and fell in love with recycling,” he said. “My biggest challenge is getting bags to the residents.”
As well as household collection, Boshomane works with informal waste-pickers. A man dragging a huge bag on wheels waves to us as we drive past.
There has been controversy around waste-pickers’ livelihoods being threatened by the recycling project, but Boshomane said they serviced areas which the project has not yet reached.
“The waste-pickers come from Alex and Joburg to resell what they collect. We started with 40 people; now there are 150 or more and we pay them for what they bring, even if they have separated it from the rubbish bags people put out,” he said.
Botha said that by including the waste-pickers’ refuse, the statistics on collection could be maintained.
Following the recycling process
Among the cans, bottles and boxes in one blue bag is an empty plastic bottle that once contained household cleaner. This becomes our chosen mascot, which we will follow through the recycling process from beginning to end.
The truck fills up quickly with bags collected by Boshomane and his crew, and we head to the sorting depot in Olifantsfontein. It is a hive of noise and movement as glass bottles crash and heaps of plastic are moved around.
We spot a photo album among the recycling waste and the team take a minute to wonder aloud why someone would throw away their holiday photos.
Depot manager Sarah Mnisi shows us thin plastic cake and fruit containers from retailers. These cannot be recycled. “They just burn and create fumes.”
The plastic bottle we are following is a different story. Made of high-density plastic (HDP), it is easily recyclable and therefore valuable.
The truck is weighed on a weighbridge, then the bags are emptied so that the waste can be separated by hand. The recycling bags go into a separate pile.
“The bags get recycled and made into more bags for next week,” said Mnisi. “We even recycle ‘chappies’ — what we call stretchy plastic, clingwrap and packaging plastic. The different types of plastic go into bulk bags, then the baler crushes these into blocks.”
The neat blocks are sold from the sorting depot. “Companies buy it and process the plastic into many different things,” said Mnisi. Shopping bags made of recycled plastic provide some peace of mind for consumers, but reusing bags goes further to reducing waste.
“Virgin plastic is also more expensive, which is why plastic manufacturers want to include recycled plastic in new items,” said Botha.
Our bottle goes into a bale with similar empty containers made of hard plastic, and Botha drives us with it to Germiston, where a plastics company buys his HDP.
We watch as the bottle travels up a conveyor belt, gets passed through a washer and is chipped into small pieces that are washed again.
The smell is putrid, a mix of rot and melting plastic. The air is filled with steam and deafening noise.
All this is necessary for a chemically manufactured item that can live forever.
“Even in those small chips, the plastic would not disintegrate in the environment for years,” said Botha.
Machines melt the chips, creating strings of molten grey plastic, the result of mixing different colours.
Finally, out come little pellets, also known as nurdles. These are sold by the million and made into everything from toys to furniture.
Down the street there is a manufacturer of chic plastic outdoor furniture. Our former container for household cleaner may end up as part of someone’s braai furniture, or as a chair on Mohanlall’s stoep, where he watches over his granddaughter.
If not for this project, the bottle might have ended up in the sea. So perhaps the effort is worth it.
Watch a video of the bottle’s journey to recycled life on the Sunday Times website