South African – Danish Environmental Co-operation
Waste watchers
A range of mini-projects in Soweto are an attempt to clean up after decades during which waste became both a weapon and a by-product of the battle between the apartheid government and the people
You experience one of the more remarkable paradoxes of South Africa almost every time you walk past a township home. Inside the tiniest shack, even where the wall paper is a patchwork of glossy supermarket brochures and the floor comprises compacted soil, everything in sight is polished and immaculately clean. Outside, however, there is waste in abundance.
Why do house-proud people accept wading through a sea of garbage as soon as they leave their homes for the streets? How do you transfer domestic pride to public spaces?
These are just two of the issues at the core of a Danced-funded project that deals with waste management in the townships of Soweto. So there we are, in Maria Nkosi’s spotless lounge, on a scorching hot afternoon, asking the difficult questions.
Nkosi, a grandmother, is a person with a strong personality, who regards the Danced funded project as a welcome extension of her own lifelong crusade against waste.
"I fell like strangling them," she says, telling us about those neighbours who dump leftovers in the street. So how on earth dare they? "In my earlier days, it wasn’t like that. When Mandela came out, it started to go like this, that people don’t care. I don’t know why," says Nkosi.
Making life unpleasant
Nkosi’s explanation is rejected by the municipality’s manager of the project, Les Venter. He thinks Nkosi is romanticizing the bad old days.
"Piles of garbage are a very visible legacy of apartheid," he says, embarking on an explanation of the problem that he has been asked to solve.
In his view, the piles of waste are part of the townships’ history as a giant repository for black workers. During the apartheid era, people were generally not allowed to live permanently, or to own property, in Soweto In the view of the apartheid government, people’s homes had to exist – whether they in fact did or not – in one of the 10 homelands set up by the government in various parts of the rural hinterland. From there they were supposed to travel to Johannesburg on work contracts. Once they expired, people had to return "home" to re-apply for permission to live in Soweto.
Many found ways to remain in the townships. But the feeling of insecurity, of being in constant transit, led to a lack of care for the neighbourhoods in which they lived and to the dumping of waste.
Venter’s second explanation of the problem lies in the attempts by the apartheid authorities to make life in Soweto as unpleasant as possible. The idea was to chase people back to the homelands, to make them feel unwanted. So in the 1970s, garbage collection was reduced to the clearance of the biggest piles on the street corners. People were encouraged to make local rubbish dumps that were occasionally loaded on to a truck.
"You thus had a combination of lack of ownership and officials condoning the rubbish piles," says Venter.
The result is still there to be seen. Many street corners in Soweto have huge holes, where garbage collecting trucks gouged up the waste over the years. When it rains, children use the pits as swimming pools regardless of the waste floating in them.
Boycotts increased problems
Nkosi suddenly remembers that dirty streets were a problem even before Mandela was released. Part of the struggle against apartheid was to make the country ungovernable by creating chaos.
"We dumped the garbage to worry the municipality," she says.
From 1986 onwards, many Sowetans participated in rent and rates boycotts. This led the authorities to cut down even further on services such as garbage collection and the maintenance of water pipes and electricity.
The next explanation comes from Smith Radingwana, Venter’s local project coordinator. He feels that part of the problem lies in the affects of urban life coupled with the demise of traditional values.
"African women used to get up early, sweeping the yard and the frontage. With new believes and ignorance, they don’t care anymore. It’s very difficult to change people’s attitudes," he says.
Recycling no solution
And so Nkosi’s lounge, where we are all meeting, is filled with a number of answers to a simple but difficult question. Only one thing is clear: Venter and Radingwana have got one of the toughest jobs in the battle against waste. Making reality out of the ideals in South Africa’s new national waste management strategy is as difficult as getting someone to pick up his neighbour’s waste.
"Our luck is that the money from Danced gives us a chance to experiment," says Venter.
One of the project’s original strategies was to encourage the residents to limit waste through recycling. Some of the inspiration for this came from co-operation with the municipality of Copenhagen. During a visit to the Danish capital, Venter and other South African officials witnessed highly successful waste separation in individual households and its subsequent recycling and composting.
Nkosi now has a huge collection of plastic bags and cardboard boxes full of old bottles in her back yard. Other people have collected cans and paper. But there is so little money in recycling in South Africa that it often costs more to transport the collected materials to a buyer than he will pay for them. The disappointment was detrimental.
"When we don’t get paid, people go back to square one," says Nkosi.
"One of the problems was that the socio-economic aspect was over emphasized. The community developed the perception that you can live from your own waste," says Venter.
Change the attitude
The revised strategy revolves around getting the recycling industry to build local buy-back centres.
"The idea is that people must be able to walk to the centre with a wheel barrow full of bottles," Venter explains.
But most important is to explain to people that recycling and a possible profit is not a target in itself, merely a means to a cleaner end. The aim of the project is to create a healthier environment with cleaner air, fewer rats – and water holes where the kids can play without getting sick.
The waste management project is also about saving money that the municipality could spend on other developments in the township.
Venter and Radingwana have engaged with a local steering committee to spread this message via mass meetings and school teachers. Recycling is still part of the game. But to reach the volumes that make recycling economically viable, people are now encouraged to donate their cans, bottles and paper to schools and other public institutions.
This approach has it own problems. It is based on the very sense of community responsibility that has so far been lacking in the townships regarding waste. And it is difficult to ask people to hand over anything that has any potential value.
"Poverty is so dire that anything with economical value creates hope. As soon as they see things given to you have a value, they want to have a part in it," says Venter.
So ultimately the only solution to the problem is also the most difficult: a complete revamp of attitudes. "It is as with alcoholism: admitting the problem is half the solution," says Venter.
The struggle continues, but it is an uphill one. Responding to a questionnaire in which respondents were not identified, only 11 percent of residents admitted to dumping.
The waste management project is one of 15 mini projects in which Danced supports local authorities which are testing methods to improve the environment in Soweto. Other examples are:
 | A database which registers the total amount of waste and how it is disposed; |
| Saving water through achieving faster response times when pipes burst; and |
| Greening through renovations of a local park. |
Some projects are hands-on in the local environment, while others try to revamp the municipal bureaucracy to secure a more efficient use of limited funds.