Environmental injustice is becoming the new normal – we must resist it

Mail & Guardian

3 days ago

The Klipspruit river polluted by sewage and mine waste in Soweto. (File photo by Delwyn Verasamy)
On this World Environment Day, I find myself reflecting less on trees, oceans, and plastic waste, and more on people's lack of access to clean drinking water and safe sanitation.
More particularly, I am thinking about the ways in which systemic environmental injustice is becoming frighteningly normalised by the generalised state of dysfunction in municipalities across South Africa.
It is a crisis that is now spreading across historic divisions of class, race, and geography. Whether you live in a township, a rural village, a flat in a so-called 'middle-income' area, or even in the leafy, wealthier suburbs, you are not immune. This crisis is becoming everyone's crisis.
And yet, it's still the most marginalised and vulnerable who suffer first and most. I want to share just three examples I personally witnessed in the past month.
These are not extreme or isolated events; they are the daily, grinding reality for a large portion of South Africans. They reflect a system of environmental neglect and both government and private-sector-driven pollution that is eroding people's rights and dignity.
Orlando Women's Hostel
At the Orlando Women's Hostel in Johannesburg, raw sewage has been overflowing from two blocked sewer lines for nearly seven years. The spill has created what can only be described as a lake – a festering, open swamp of human waste flowing past homes, into streets, and eventually into the already heavily polluted Klip River. Adult residents speak of summer days spent holed up indoors to keep out the flies, while children play outside next to the stinking swamp.
When I reported it to Johannesburg Water, they unblocked one drain and left. The sewage kept flowing. I was then told it's a housing issue – the hostel falls under municipal housing, and the matter must be referred there. That's where accountability ends. Activists come, journalists come, yet nothing changes.
This is not an accident – it's a systemic failure of the state; it is environmental injustice in its most direct and practical sense. A violation of the right to dignity, the right to health, and the constitutional right to a clean and safe environment.
WaterWorks informal settlement
The irony of the name is not lost on the people of WaterWorks, where water doesn't work at all.
WaterWorks is an informal housing settlement. Residents rely on JoJo tanks that are sporadically filled and cleaned by Joburg Water – if at all.
When I visited, the tanks hadn't been filled for three days. To make matters even worse, these tanks are scattered far apart, making them hard to access, especially for elderly residents who are forced to pay young people R10 to R20 per trip to carry water. This is money taken from already meagre SASSA grants.
The toilets in WaterWorks are shared chemical units. One elderly woman related how one night she was suffering from diarrhoea but was too scared to walk alone in the dark at 2am to reach a toilet far from her house.
Such daily realities chip away at one's dignity; basic human rights are made conditional, fragile, and unequal – tied to geography and class. Environmental justice is not just about having clean air and protecting flora and fauna; it's the ability to use a toilet safely and access water with dignity.
Claremont council flats
In Claremont, a small pocket of council flats has had no reliable water for nearly a decade. This cannot be explained by elevation, pressure, or some complicated infrastructure glitch.
The community has tried to explain to city authorities that their water challenges are not related to recent maintenance issues or leaking reservoirs. The harsh reality is that Claremont's scattered blocks of flats have been – and remain – forgotten.
All residents are asking is to be heard and for a proper investigation to be done. When I met residents, they simply wanted to be acknowledged, to have some short-term solutions implemented – like extra JoJo tanks – and, most of all, clear answers.
In the meantime, they've adapted. They keep records of water outages not in months or years, but in life events.
'My firstborn is 11 – I came home from the hospital with no water.'
'My grandson is 6 – when we brought him home, I was fetching water with pots.'
'When my mother had a stroke, I had no water to wash her.'
What this reveals so clearly is that the impact of environmental injustice is not abstract. It is intimate. It lives in our births, our deaths, our illnesses – and our everyday survival.
What I have briefly outlined are just three cases, all taken within a period of just one month, in just one metro. Multiply that by every small town, every metro, every province, every forgotten township, every rural area – and you can start to see the scale of the crisis and the challenges we need to confront and change.
On World Environment Day, we must challenge – in word and deed – the assumption that environmental issues are somehow separate from daily life.
The environment is not somewhere 'out there.' It is our sewerage systems, our taps, our rivers, our toilets. And increasingly, those systems are failing – not because of nature or a few bad entities and officials, but because of systemic government mismanagement and indifference, grounded in the structural inequalities that remain deeply embedded in South African society.
While environmental injustice is very much about the toxic waste that big industries dump into our rivers, it is also very much about what our own government consciously allows – or directly causes – in places where they think no one is watching, or where no one powerful lives.
We simply cannot allow this to continue. If we are serious about justice – environmental, social, or economic – we need to hold all those entities and individuals responsible, accountable. The only way that is going to happen is if we come together, across the very same divisions of class, race, and geography that this crisis traverses. Power can belong to the people.
Dr Ferrial Adam is the executive director of