South Africans need to play their part in circular plastics economy

South Africans, accustomed to the sight of waste-pickers going through their rubbish bins, donating old clothes and goods to the less fortunate and giving food to needy strangers, may believe local communities are doing well at reducing waste, or creating “circularity”.

In a country where poverty and hunger confront the majority of the population, many people are convinced that not much goes to waste. But they are wrong. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), about a third of the food produced in SA — estimated at 10-million tonnes and valued by the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) at R61.5bn — ends up in dumps every year.

We are equally wasteful in our handling of plastic, which has been identified as a major polluter and contributor to climate change. According to the IUCN-EA-Quantis report “National Guidance for plastic pollution hotspotting & shaping action”, published in 2020, about 70% of plastic waste in SA is collected, but only about 14% is recycled, with more than half (56%) dumped in landfills and the remainder uncollected or leaked into the environment.

Earlier research into plastic recycling found that only 45% of the plastics placed on the market in 2019 were collected for recycling into a new product. In some plastics, almost 30% of material entering the recycling plant cannot be recycled in that process. Furthermore, 30% was not collected at all.

The effective management of plastic is therefore an issue SA urgently needs to address. In addition, with landfill space fast running out, there is a desperate need to reduce waste to landfill. Yet statistics from Stats SA’s Household Survey show that South Africans generally do not separate their waste at home, despite the value in some packaging materials to collectors.

The proportion of households that separate their waste is highest in Cape Town (23%), followed by Johannesburg at 16%, Ekurhuleni at 13% and eThekwini and Tshwane both at 8%. Only 6% of households in Nelson Mandela Bay, 5% in Buffalo City and 1% in Mangaung separate their waste.

A deterioration of municipal services in some regions and the lack of infrastructure to aggregate and sort collected wastes definitely compounds the problem. But a lack of understanding by many South Africans of what a circular economy entails, and the economic benefits that circularity brings, is not helping.

A circular economy refers to a system encompassing the entire life cycle of products, and includes sourcing of renewable feedstock, eliminating unnecessary production and consumption, designing products for maximum lifetime in the economy, and improving systems to recover, reuse and recycle materials at end of life.

Circularity in plastic — which as indicated is a burning issue SA needs to tackle urgently — is not only recycling or waste management, even though recycling is now the most prevalent circular economy activity. A circular economy for plastics is a system designed to value plastic and establish a viable plastic value chain that keeps plastics in circulation.

It means products are designed for multiple lives, not just one life, and that there are business opportunities and jobs in the reuse and recycling of plastic. Apart from reducing the burden on landfills, the economic benefits of a circular economy for plastics are significant.

A study conducted by the WWF, “Economic Case for a Circular Plastics Economy in Africa: Modelling Outcomes & Policy Recommendations for Ivory Coast, Kenya & SA”, which will be published later in this year, projects that a circular economy for plastic packaging will grow SA’s GDP by an additional 2% and generate an additional $7.8bn in GDP growth by 2050.

Conversely, if SA continues on its path (predominantly a linear economy with most plastics landfilled), we will limit the country’s growth and income opportunities. Circularity therefore presents SA — facing record unemployment, slow growth and mandatory reduction of its greenhouse gas emissions — with enormous potential to address quite a few of its most pressing problems.

So what is required for SA to establish circularity in plastics? A different approach to how we use and treat plastic is critical. First, rather than design for single use, retailers and producers need to ensure their packaging is high quality and can be reused, with refill stations in store, as well as recycled over and over again. While more producers are committing to this, there is a lot more that still needs to be done on this front.

Additionally, we need to look carefully at opportunities in collecting and sorting. This is where ordinary South Africans need to play their part. As indicated, there is poor “separation at source” in SA households. This results in high levels of contamination of plastics entering recycling plants, which places a significant cost burden on recyclers.

While SA has separation away from source, where active informal collectors recover materials from our bins and landfills, better separation of plastic at source (in homes and businesses) will provide better quality inputs to the recycling process. SA therefore needs to give attention and energy to designing a more inclusive separation system.

When it comes to collection, while SA’s army of generally unheralded waste-picker heroes are doing a sterling job, we need to relook at the incentives for, and benefits of, collecting waste. SA needs a more inclusive system of collection with better social and environmental benefits.

A promising avenue for further exploration is reuse rather than recycling — as with glass — as it has several benefits, including maintaining packaging material at its highest quality for longer, and delivering savings for consumers, as they would only pay for packaging once, not with every purchase. There also needs to be greater alignment between producers and recyclers, as well as better collaboration between all parts of the recycling value chain, to ensure the system is sustainable.

In the past few years it has become clear that solving our demand side-issues, by brand owners and retailers specifying recycled content in their products, will go a long way towards increasing the amount of plastic recycled in the country. And that all starts with a proper understanding of the circular economy and circularity.

• Dr Barnes is project leader of the SA Plastics Pact, a collaborative platform between business, producer responsibility organisations, the informal and formal waste sectors, non-governmental organisations and government, which is targeting 70% of plastic packaging to be recycled and a 30% average recycled content across all plastic packaging by 2025.