Joburg’s transformation into a world-class city begins with presenting a clean and hygienic environment to all the City’s residents and visitors. In this regard, the city’s waste management entity, Pikitup has a crucial role to play and the entity’s participation at WasteCon 2012 is an opportunity to showcase their efforts. This biannual conference, running over 3 days, is taking place in East London’s International Convention Centre and started on Wednesday, 10 October 2012.

WasteCon 2012 marks the 20th year of the waste management conference and exhibition, hosted by the Eastern Cape Branch of the Institute of Waste Management of South Africa. This premier biannual event brings together thousands of industry professionals from around the country for training courses, technical sessions and exhibits. The 2012 theme is “Wrestling with Waste”, focusing on broad topics such as Employment, Environment and Engineering.

Piktup’s Executive for Legal Compliance Environment & Safety, Zandile Mpungose, will be speaking on Waste Minimisation and Recycling Strategy for the City of Joburg with Emphasis on Separation of Recyclable Waste at Source. “We have recently rolled out our Trash to Treasure project to the Zondi, Soweto area – the project not only encourages residents to recycle their household refuse, which is ordinarily tossed away, but it also promotes job creation through the exchange of money for recyclable waste.  This ties in perfectly to Zandile’s topic at WasteCon this year,” said Pikitup Managing Director Amanda Nair.

Pikitup’s idea is to get residents to start turning trash (waste) into treasure (resource), thereby evoking a change in mindset where value can still be extracted from what was previously viewed as useless.

Those attending the event have been taking part in a number of informative sessions that both challenge ones thinking and remind one of the importance for businesses to implement strategies that will minimise the effect of waste on our environment.

Johannesburg is actually one of the first cities in South Africa to embark on such a large recycling initiative and in her presentation Mpungose will go into more detail on the strategy as well as the principles behind it.  She will also be delving into operations of the project, touching on the business model, project structure and the marketing and communication driving the project.

“WasteCon, will continue to be one of the most important conferences in Pikitup’s calendar of events, as it is a platform for us to educate and learn from other organisations about the importance of managing waste and other environmental issues and where we can connect with new and existing waste industry clients”, said Mpungose.

For further information on Pikitup’s services, please contact Joburg Connect on (011) 375 5555 or 0860 562874 (0860 JOBURG), alternatively visit www.pikitup.co.za.