A wasteland of ‘treasures’...

David Hlongwane, left, has been living on the Hatherley municipal dumping site in Mamelodi for three years now.

According to him, spending your days sieving through the mountains of rubbish looking for things to recycle is a lucrative pastime. He earns roughly R600 a day because he waits at the entrance and jumps on the back of the incoming dumping trucks, looking for valuables first.

But his nyaope addiction is expensive and he spends all this money on his next fix.

Among the plastic bags, used nappies and rotten leftovers the body of a newborn baby was found – apparently a regular occurrence and the dumpsite dwellers did not even pause to pay any attention to the emergency ve- hicle that arrived a day after the discovery of the decaying corpse.

According to the dumpsite dwellers most of the people living here are foreign nationals.

Zimbabwean Question Muheyo has been arriving every morning for the past two years to set up a little shop where she sells cigarettes and alcohol. She also has a recycling business and collects paper from the dwellers at R1/kg. She then takes it to Johannesburg to have it recycled.

Many of the dwellers earn an honest living making money out of other’s trash. But the easy availability of alcohol and nyaope makes it difficult to stay honest, particularly for the unemployed youths looking for ways to earn a living in these harsh economic times.

TREASURE HUNT. People rush to a dumping truck to have first pick on possible valuables in the trash. The pickers are looking for any metals, plastics and paper that can be recovered.

MOUNTAIN OF WORK. Dumpsite dwellers are wading through mountains of trash, looking for ‘valuables’ at the Hatherley municipal dumping site in Mamelodi, Pretoria.

PRECIOUS LIFE GONE. A red jacket is seen propped up over a colourful blanket covering the body of a newborn baby that was discovered among the trash.

DRINKS BREAK. A dumpsite dweller takes a swig during a break.