PLASTIC PANDEMIC
South Africa using more plastic than ever
Seagulls took over Muizenberg beach in Cape Town during level 5 lockdown, when most people, besides ornithologist professor Peter Ryan and unruly surfers, were absent.
Lockdown allowed “Professor Plastics” the opportunity to study beach litter without human interference. He found that plastics were still the biggest source of pollution. This included yellow carrier bags regurgitated by the gulls.
Plastic debris is piling up across SA as consumers use more and more of it, with fast-paced lifestyles and the demand for on-the-go snacks, drinks and convenience foods exacerbating the problem.
A major report published by the World Wide Fund for Nature SA this week estimated that every year almost 1-billion units of chips, biscuits and chocolates are sold through formal retail markets in SA. This generates an estimated 1,600t of plastic packaging waste that is not currently recycled— and will most likely end up in landfills, open dumps or as litter.
Waste pickers do the heavy lifting
In 2017, 11 kilotons of plastic waste, the equivalent of 10-billion chip packets, littered SA.
And things are getting worse. From 2017 to 2018, total plastic consumption increased from 29kg to
36kg per person. More than half of the plastic raw material in SA goes into packaging.
Globally, an estimated 1,400 dump trucks’worth of plastic waste goes into the ocean every 24 hours, roughly 80% of which is packaging, says environmental engineer Lorren de Kock, co-author of the report, Plastics: Facts and Futures.
What’s made things worse is that some South African waste collection and recycling operations, lacking the required investment and support, closed under lockdown and have not reopened their doors.
Even before the pandemic, less than half of “plastic scrap” in 2018 was collected for recycling in SA, and only 68% of that was converted to recycled materials.
At the moment, informal waste pickers collect between 80% and 90% of recyclable waste, earning an average of R50 a day for this grimy work. De Kock says they should be integrated into the formal economy.
Waste (mis)management
Widespread illegal dumping continues to be a symptom of the country’s “weak and fragmented waste management system”.
Weaknesses in the system include inadequate collection and sorting infrastructure.
In some municipalities as little as 1% of the waste management spending goes to clean-ups of litter and illegal dumping. In Waterval Boven, a tourist attraction in Mpumalanga, pigs can be seen foraging at the local dump where litter spills onto the road, a stark example of this mismanagement.