“We have at least eight years to go before we run out of landfill space in the City of Johannesburg.” Shadrack Kapiwa, Pikitup’s GM for Communications and Stakeholder Management

City of Johannesburg’s solid waste management service provider and the biggest waste management company in Africa unveiled its waste minisation plan for the city – placing sustainability at the forefront of its operations. “Landfill space is fast depleting and is impacting the environment negatively at an alarming pace mostly because of the rapid population growth in the City of Johannesburg (CoJ),” says Zandile Mpungose, Pikitup’s Executive: Legal Environment Compliance and Safety, “And that, in turn, links directly to excessive waste production.” Speaking at the annual 2011 EnvirCon Conference, targeted at environmental managers and specialists from large organisations around SA and aimimg to present solutions and opportunities to the environmental issues which the country faces, Mpungose stressed on the importance of waste reduction as “we simply do not have the space to accommodate the continuously increasing levels of waste being generated as more people move into the city”.

The CoJ’s population is growing at a rate of 9% annually. More than a space issue, the local environment cannot withstand the sustained impact. As the city’s constituionally mandated solid waste management company, Pikitup needs to find a meaningful and sustainable way of reducing the levels of waste generated and that need to be managed and ultimately disposed of at landfill.

The plan moving forward
Looking at what constitutes waste, how it is generated and ultimately managed, Pikitup’s plan, moving forward, is to drastically cut down on waste produced in order to then reduce what needs to be disposed of down the line. Mpungose explains: “ We’re looking at reducing the waste that is produced by residents, businesses and individuals so that we have less to dispose of at landfills.” This is in line with the National Waste Management Strategy which cabinet approved on 10 November 2011. The strategy reveals trends on minimising waste and therefore reducing the negative impacts on the environment. The ultimate objective is to change Pikitup’s current value chain from ‘collect, transport and dispose’ to ‘rethink, reduce, reuse, recycle’. “Even though we encourage people to reduce waste creation, we must accept that realistically there will always be some level of waste generated,” says Mpungose.

Critical to this process is changing the public’s mindset and attitude towards the creation and management of waste. Pikitup will bolster its education and awareness drive so that Joburg citizens can understand what the company is trying to achieve as not much can be achieved without public support and active participation.

Manufacturers must take back
Pikitup is looking to divert at least 33% of waste from landfills through a combination of product stewardship (take-back) programmes where manufacturers take back their own packaging and other recyclable products, the development of facilities which promote re-use, recycling and composting. These initiatives will, in turn, increase CoJ residents’ participation in recycling, support the roll out of infrastructure for waste diversion, such as Materials Recovery Facilities, composting plants, waste transfer stations and builder’s rubble plants, and finally, through extensive city-wide education and awareness outreach programmes.

Pikitup has already embarked on a number of initiatives which contribute towards CoJ’s goal of emitting less carbon emmissions. “We presently run the Clean City Campaign, the highlight of which is the annual Clean-up Day. It also incorporates the Illegal Dumping Programme, which is about combatting the problem of illicitly discarding waste in any open space around the city. In 2012 we will expand the Separation at Source initiative to include more suburbs, which will feature an education drive to get more households to separate their refuse from home to help minimise what ends up at the landfill site,” Mpungose concludes.