Latest news with #DepartmentofEnvironmentalAffairs'
IOL News
6 days ago
- Business
- IOL News
How informal recycling provides a lifeline for South Africa's waste pickers
Waste collectors play an important role and save municipalities R300 million to R750 million annually. Image: Nokuthula Mbatha / Independent Newspapers The high unemployment rate, coupled with limited formal sector opportunities, has pushed many individuals, such as Thabiso Leburu* (not his real name), into informal recycling as a means of survival. Leburu, a former ArcelorMittal employee, said this was an opportunity to generate income and feed his family after his contract ended in 2010. Leburu and other recyclers are camping at a dumping site near the Boipatong landfill site, in the Vaal, where they are attending to every vehicle dropping waste. He said this is their daily routine. They recycle wood, plastics, cans, and bottles. The high unemployment rate, reaching 32.9% in the first quarter of 2025, is driving many to seek alternative income through activities such as waste picking. This informal sector, often referred to as 'survivalist entrepreneurs', plays a crucial role in waste management and contributes to the livelihoods of thousands. The Department of Environmental Affairs' report on the determination of the extent and role of waste picking estimates that there are approximately 62,147 reclaimers in South Africa. However, the department did respond at the time of publication. According to the case study by the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (Seri), the sector recovers an estimated 80% to 90% of paper and packaging materials on an annual basis. Diverting these recyclables saves municipalities R300 million to R750 million annually. The organisation said it was also estimated that the South African economy realised a 52.6% recycling rate for paper and packaging waste because of the work of recyclers. Despite their contribution and resourcefulness, informal recyclers remain poor and marginalised. They are often associated with crime, drug abuse, and lawlessness, a perception perpetuated by exclusionary waste management policies and the treatment they receive from South Africans they encounter. Most often, the informal recyclers do not have access to food of nutritional value or any food at all. This means they often find themselves in the struggle to escape the spiral of food insecurity as they are unable to earn a decent living. Leburu, who is the father of six children, said the sector has changed their lives for the better, adding that many could have been exposed to criminal activities. 'That little money I receive in a day could help me to put bread on the table,' said the 54-year-old, adding that he makes between R30 and R400 a day. He said he used to make good money before the closure of the Boipatong landfill site. The landfill site was closed due to non-adherence to licence conditions, leading to increased illegal dumping in the area. 'Sometimes we don't make money at all. And because we cannot let our kids sleep with empty stomachs, we take stale food here. All we want to see is our kids and families being happy,' he said. His friend, who also requested to remain anonymous, said he has been employed and has been in this sector since 2001. He said this is because he has to feed his family of three children. Seri said the sector continues to attract large numbers of people as it offers low barriers to entry due to limited opportunities. This was despite the occupational hazards and health risks associated with informal recycling. The organisation said many recyclers have some education and skills but are unable to find employment outside of the reclaiming industry. Seri added that 25% of reclaimers in South Africa have completed matric, and some have engaged in formal tertiary studies. The organisation visited the landfill in Orange Farm (known as the Palm Springs landfill) where about 300 people from the area and nearby surrounding areas pick and sort waste. The organisation said these reclaimers deal with several challenges on a day-to-day basis, adding that the safety of the landfill was a concern, especially for women. 'Reclaimers wear no protective clothing, have no access to water and toilets, and are exposed to dangerous chemicals and materials.' 'In addition, reclaimers do not have access to safety equipment and are often harassed by security guards and police.' [email protected]
Daily Maverick
04-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
A tale of two dams — Grasslands restoration is as important as engineering solutions to ensure SA's future water security
In his State of the Nation Address, President Ramaphosa boasted of the preparations to build the Ntabelanga Dam in the Eastern Cape. However, this R10-billion construction will quickly go to waste if the grasslands above it aren't repaired, and catchment restoration is dead in the water after government funding cuts and stagnant tendering processes. From a bird's eye view, this bank on the Tina River in the Eastern Cape highlands looks like it's suffering a failed hair transplant. The satellite photos capture row upon row of round plugs in neat symmetry in the ochre ground. Some have a faint shadow where grass has sprouted. Most are the leftover contours of hand-dug ponds, each not much wider than the diameter of a car tyre, which were sunk into the cement-hard ground in the hope that they'd become islands of plant growth that would allow the veld to recover. If the grass regrows and stabilises the riverbank, it should slow the flood of topsoil and sand that has clogged up the Mount Fletcher weir, a small downstream reservoir that cost R900-million to build, but now can only hold a third of its intended capacity. The weir has become something of a personality in conservation circles, but for all the wrong reasons. Just four years after a low, scalloped wall was built across an elbow of the Tina River in 2014 on the outskirts of a town that shared its name — today, the town falls under Tlokoeng — the weir had lost roughly two-thirds of its holding capacity. The upstream grassland is so threadbare from overgrazing that the soil had been scoured away by rain and dumped into the belly of the reservoir. Just 50km from here is the site of the proposed Ntabelanga Dam, a R10-billion project that has been on the cards for a decade and which was a talking point in President Cyril Ramaphosa's State of the Nation Address this February. Natural resource managers inside government, as well as conservationists with civil society organisations, warn that if the grasslands in the dam's catchment aren't repaired, this costly investment will face the same plight as the Mount Fletcher weir. Back in 2014, the department's chief director of the then Department of Environmental Affairs' Natural Resource Management Programmes, Dr Christo Marias calculated that for just 5% of the total cost of the project – which covers the building of the dam, a water treatment plant and the bulk water distribution network – spent over a 12 year period, these grasslands can be stabilised enough to keep the Ntabelanga Dam relatively silt-free. That amounts to R532-million in total, or around R44-million a year. But government funding for wetland and grassland restoration, including the clearing of invasive alien plants under the Working for Water and related ecosystem restoration projects, has been throttled so dramatically that it has brought restoration work here in the Eastern Cape and in many other parts of the country to an indefinite halt. The Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) attributes this to the response by its then-minister, Barbara Creecy, to post-Covid budget cuts by the Treasury, which hit all departments hard. But people close to the DFFE say a shift in spending priorities is to blame, along with a change in 2015 to an onerous and slow tender process for distributing funds. The abandoned riverbank repair job upstream of the Mount Fletcher weir was among the victims, as were the many people who were paid to wield shovels as part of the restoration work. Rob Scholz is known in these parts as the guy who mends broken wetlands. It's a miserable Eastern Cape day in February, and he's explaining why the municipality was paying locals to dig 40,000-odd pint-sized ponds in the banks of the Tina River, and how these might help the riverbank recover. '(Rain) just runs off (hard soil). You get hardly any absorption of water. With that ponding you're making little water traps.' Each pond can hold about 25l of water. Even if a pond is only half-filled during a storm, a catchment with 40,000 such indentations can store half a million litres of water, allowing it to seep slowly into the soil rather than flashing off the top and stripping away anything unmoored in its path. Over time, they become islands which hold moisture and in which plants germinate and take root. 'It was actually amazing. Within a year, some of those areas grassed up.' The before-and-after photographs bear up. The recovery at some sites where the teams worked is objectively quite remarkable. Scholz is interrupted by his phone. Someone wants advice on what kind of animal feed to buy. A trained forester, Scholz worked in the natural resource management office at the Joe Gqabi District Municipality (JGDM) for 24 years and was unit manager when he and his team lost their jobs in 2024. Now, Scholz works for a local agri-business operation based in Ugie and Nqanqarhu. The municipality's funding for the Tina River work came mostly from the pool of money aimed at ecosystem restoration work, the Working for Water and related projects that fall under the DFFE's budget for environmental programmes. But in 2015 the state changed how it distributes these funds, from a grant system, to one that requires municipalities to tender for funds alongside private contractors. The red tape proved to be onerous and the processing so slow that funding often came through too late in a financial year to allow the clearing and restoration work to be done on time. The uncertainty made planning difficult. By 2020, tender processing slowed and then ground to a halt. Scholz and acting municipal manager Fiona Sephton went as far as to travel to Cape Town to get some clarity from the DFFE on their applications. Meanwhile, the municipality was fast running out of money to keep its natural resource management office and its contractors afloat. To date, no tenders have been issued for Working for Water (WfW) projects in the Eastern Cape for two years. The post-Covid cash crunch also saw the Treasury cut budgets dramatically across all departments. Creecy's response within the DFFE resulted in the WfW's pot reduced from R1.7-billion in the 2020/21 financial year, to just R377-million in 2024. The department confirmed these figures, saying it reflected Creecy's response to general funding cuts at the time. Although the department's own figures suggest that the cuts to WfW were a shift in priorities rather than a shortage of cash. The total spend for the department's environmental programmes, under which WfW sits, remains relatively constant since then – R2.6-billion for 2020/21 and 2021/22; R3.2-billion for 2022/23; and R2.9-billion for 2023/24 — even while WfW has seen a 78% decrease on the previous budget. Several sources outside the department who are close to its senior structures, as well as staff inside the department, say this was a political decision reflecting changing priorities rather than a shortage of funding. The DFFE did not respond to specific questions relating to this decision. Either way, these events proved the death knell for the district municipality's grasslands repair work – which was positioned as job creation and economic development, not water catchment management since this isn't a municipal mandate – money for the team's salaries was gone, as were the funds to pay contracting teams drawn from the Tlokoeng community who did the heavily lifting in the restoration work along the Tina River. With no fixed contract, Scholz left his job of nearly 25 years at the municipality 'with nothing', not even a retrenchment package. 'It's one of those things,' he says pragmatically. Others are far worse off. 'We had about 850 to 900 people working in these programmes [across the wider district].' By his estimation, the district municipality is probably the second-biggest employer in the area, after the local private forestry company, PG Bison. There isn't much work for people in the town of Tlokoeng, formerly known as Mount Fletcher. Most families are dependent on social grants, so the Tina River restoration work was a boon when it happened, says Chief Montoeli Lehana of the Batlokoa Traditional Council. He was the main liaison between the Tlokoeng community and the JGDM for the Tina River work, and is understated when he says how 'sad' it was when the money dried up. 'It employed about 30 contractors, and each contractor employed plus-minus 20 people,' he says. The principal of the local high school even commented on how pupils were arriving at school with food in their stomachs when these jobs were in play. 'It was sad when we heard that there's no more budget for that project. Imagine, the number of people who suddenly had to stop [working] because there was no budget. The explanation was not enough.' There's no indication from the new environment minister, Dr Dion George, who took the helm of DFFE in July 2024, whether he will revisit the spending decisions for ecosystem restoration nationally, or grasslands rehabilitation here in the catchments of the Mount Fletcher weir or the proposed Ntabelanga Dam. But whatever shuffling of funds happens in budgetary spreadsheets in the DFFE's national office has real-world consequences for the future of water catchments of the Eastern Cape and the food that families can put on the table in obscure rural towns like Tlokoeng that are far from the corridors of power. DM This is part of the Golden Threads series for the Story Ark – tales from southern Africa's climate tipping points project, which investigates the state of the country's old-growth grasslands, the free natural services they offer and what South Africa needs to do to conserve and repair them. The series is a collaboration with the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation, which supports investigative journalism.
