The 23^rd WasteCon conference got underway in Johannesburg this week. The biennial conference brought together hundreds of industry experts to discuss challenges facing the ever-changing waste management sector.

Jonathan Shamrock, Chairman of the WasteCon 2016 Organising Committee, said “At this year’s conference we see a shift in focus to resource recovery and alternatives to landfilling. The reality is that South Africa is running out of landfill airspace and waste as a resource is becoming ever more prominent.”

The keynote speaker, Torben Kristiansen looked at waste management challenges in the European Union (EU) and the challenges in SA’s waste management sector.

“What’s the future of landfilling,” he asked. Kristiansen said most countries were only landfilling between two and eight percent. He added that we needed to change our regulations and taxes to help manage the complex waste sector better.

Where are we failing?

Kristiansen said SA, like parts of the EU, were wasting “really valuable landfill capital investment”. He continued to say that the fiscal system hindered growth and that the political inability to make necessary decisions meant that SA would continue to face landfill crises and that embracing new technology would be delayed. He indicated that this was a universal problem.

“Africa is the continent where waste will increase the most,” he said, and added that SA’s key challenge was that there was no reliable data on how much waste actually exists. This would impact the country’s ability to plan efficiently. He also said that SA’s waste management plans have not always been “very ambitious” and that many local municipalities have only provided waste collection to 10% of households.

How can we focus on improving?

• We need to find a way to get reliable data so we can plan better.
• We need to reduce our landfill dependency.
• We need to recycle more and ask that metros push this initiative to recycle waste to energy, so as to use waste as a resource.

However, he said that SA had “come a long way” and that there were many opportunities for “adding tools to our toolbox of waste management”, including recycling and converting waste to energy. “We are embarking on a journey toward a circular economy, but it requires an immense paradigm shift. I believe that we should start making the shift now and this conference is a brilliant opportunity,” he said.

The Institute of Waste Management of Southern Africa (IWMSA) is also celebrating their 40^th year of promoting a clean and healthy environment. Jan Palm, incoming president of the IWMSA, said: “We have a very diverse membership and we cover all themes of waste management. It is only by covering all of these themes that we can successfully contribute to promoting sustainable waste management practices.”

The main themes at the conference are recycling, waste management and landfill engineering. The conference is taking place until Thursday, 20 October 2016.