South Africa has a lot of catching up to do on reducing waste. Cape Town is the first municipality in the country to develop a by-law and calculate the cost for integrated waste management. The city's landfill sites are almost full, and its 3.2 million residents produce up to 6 000 tons of waste per day. But recycling is not yet routine for most of the population, and very little has been done to reduce product packaging.
There is some movement now in the area of construction waste. Machines to crush concrete for reuse in new construction projects have been available in South Africa for a decade, but demand for the crushers has only taken off within the past year, as contracters start to see the financial benefit of recycling concrete. Particularly in Cape Town, but also in other centres, it is becoming too costly for large volumes of concrete to be dumped - so apart from the environmental impact, there is now a financial incentive to change waste disposal practice.
Now the National Waste Management Act, passed earlier this year, deals with waste in all its manifestations. It stipulates requirements for recycled material in new buildings, and also provides for certain products to contain specified proportions of recycled material.
The voluntary Green Star building rating system gives credit for recycled content in buildings, but this will be the first emergence of a legal requirement. Coupled with this will be stiffer penalties for illegal dumping. [Source: Construction World, April 2009]
The Act is an outcome of the National Waste Management Strategy and the 1997 White Paper on National Environmental Management. In its objectives, the White Paper defined a hierarchy of waste management practices that remains a key principle of the waste management policy:
- Reduction of waste at source;
- Re-use; Recycle; and
- Safe disposal as a last resort.
The Act will start to apply these practices.
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