Recycling boosts SMME development
ITH South Africa’s National Recycling Day on Friday 14 September and National Recycling Day part of Clean-Up Week from 10-15 September it is an important opportunity to highlight the case for the benefits of recycling that is the compound of a cleaner environment, job creation, reduced costs to local authorities, decreased necessity to import raw materials, and freeing up space at landfill sites.
While the growth in waste recovery rates is a promising trend for the country, because of the obvious environmental benefits of recycling, perhaps even more important, is the economic benefits generated for the economy, primarily for small, medium and micro enterprises collecting and processing recovered materials.
“The recycling industry creates opportunities for small, medium and micro enterprises through its recycle collection programmes and is a major contributor to job growth in this country. It is estimated that 100 000 people are employed in the recycling industry in South Africa, with around 30 000 of these involved in paper recycling alone,” says John Hunt, managing director of Mpact Recycling.
Linked to the economic benefits of recycling paper is the fact that the recovered paper is beneficiated locally.
“The paper collected by Mpact Recycling is used as raw material by Mpact’s mills to make recycled-based paper, which in turn processed by our corrugated business into recycled-based containerboard and cartonboard.
“This creates significant downstream employment opportunities,” says Hunt.
WHe reports that the good news is that the volume of paper recovered for recycling in South Africa has increased by almost a third over the past decade and could be up to 63percent by 2017, according to statistics from the Paper Recycling Association of South Africa (PRASA).
South Africa has seen paper recovery rates increase significantly in the last decade, rising to 59 percent in 2011 from 38percent in 2000. This puts the country just ahead of global recovery rates of 55.6 percent, according to the 2011 International Council of Forest and Paper Association.
“There is no doubt that we are beginning to see a culture of recycling in homes, schools and small businesses, as well as across many industries nationwide, which is reflected in the growth figures we’ve observed over the past decade,” says Hunt.
“However, there still plenty of room for improvement, particularly in collections from households.”
Hunt says while the largest source of recovered paper is from the paper converting industries such as printers and box manufacturers, as well as large businesses, industries and shopping centres, recovering paper from schools, households and offices is a relatively unexploited opportunity as reclamation from these sources account for less than 10percent of Mpact Recycling’s total collection.
Coca-Cola South Africa Business Unit (SABU) senior technical operations manager and chairperson of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recycling company Petco Casper Durandt confirms the recycling trend saying that going forward, the company is going to continue on its journey of reducing, reusing and recycling.
“Where we cannot reduce or reuse, Coca-Cola in South Africa will recycle. We are actively promoting the reuse of plastic bottles by developing a Coca-Cola- approved solution in South Africa, which will involve recycling them into plastic bottles again,” says Durandt.
He explains that packaging is an integral part of the CocaCola business.
It maintains the safety and integrity of the company’s products but it is also a source of waste if not integrated into the recycling industry.
Coca-Cola strives to eliminate waste - material, energy and water losses – over the entire life of its packaging by implementing four key themes: reducing the amount of material used, renewing packaging, recovering waste and litter from packaging and reusing materials.
Durandt says in South Africa, more than 50 percent of our beverage volume today is delivered in PET plastic bottles. Efficiency improvements in manufacturing and transport, together with high recyclability, have helped make PET plastic bottles a sound environmental choice.
Coca-Cola South Africa is a founding member of the PET Recycling Company (PETCO) in 2004. This company has a sole focus of promoting and improving the waste management and recycling of post-consumer PET products on behalf of all stakeholders in the PET industry.
According to Durandt, PET is the most recycled domestic packaging polymer on the shelves. Currently, 1,4-billion PET bottles being recycled across South Africa with close to 4-million bottles recycled every day (subsidised by PETCO). This is a collection and recycling rate of 42%.
“Not only does recycling impact positively on the environment, it contributes significantly to the economy. The sustainable use of PET means industry does not need to use more and more virgin material and fossil fuels, or rely on importing of PET fibre. It means South Africa can create more jobs at home both in collecting and converting into valuable new products.”
Durandt explains that when PET bottles and packaging is collected and delivered to buyback centres, it is washed and sorted by colour. It is cut into PET chips and melted down to then be processed into PET fibre.
He says this fibre is turned into proudly South African products such as insulation for homes, fibre for duvets, sleeping bags and pillows. So are various car parts, carpeting, fleece fabric for clothing, and geo-textiles for road stabilisation and construction.
Most importantly, according to Durnadt, South African can now also turn recycled PET back into packaging for food, closing the loop and reducing waste. This process is also sometimes called Bottle-2-Bottle (B2B) recycling.
Durandt points out that according to Collect-A-Can, in excess of 100 000 people are earning or supplementing their income by the recovery of used metal cans.
He says Collect-a-Can has paid in excess of R200 million for used metal cans over the past 19 years, which has been directed towards income generation for the unemployed.