It is alleged that the City of Cape Town is spending approximately half a million rand a year on maintaining an old landfill site.

The dump site, located beneath the popular kite-surfing beach of Witsands between Kommetjie and Scarborough, was used for roughly 30 years until 1985.

According to Cape Argus, the sand dune system was used by the former Divisional Council of the Cape as a domestic disposal site, and still contains tons of plastic, bottles, shoes and other non-biodegradable material which is buried a few metres deep.

A project had to be undertaken 10 years ago to rehabilitate the beach and re-establish the dunes over the landfill site to prevent large amounts of pollution from washing into the sea.

Justifying the costs

Some have questioned how the City of Cape Town could justify spending such large sums of money on a dump that closed 30 years ago. However, Gregg Oelofse, the council’s head of environmental policy and strategy, told Cape Argus that the removal of the landfill site would cost around R40 million – money that the City simply does not have.

According to Oelofse, moving the rubbish from the Witsands site to the currently operational False Bay landfill would take months and would require a fleet of trucks to commute along an already congested road.

Oelofse said that the landfill site is a challenging project to manage because it is a dynamic, shifting sand dune beach system. However, it is a project that the city has managed successfully for nearly a decade.

This has been done by using old alien vegetation and building wind traps which helped slow down the wind and thicken the layer of sand. Before winter the city also open a channel along the side of the landfill site to the sea.

Importantly, notes Oelofse, around 65 to 70% of the money spent managing the project went towards job creation in Ocean View.

 

Adapted from Cape Argus