A wasteland of rubbish...

WARNING: SA CAN BECOME A DUMPING GROUND FOR WASTE TYRES, GLASS AND PLASTIC

- Steve Kretzmann

The amount of waste going to landfills or polluting the environment is hugely underestimated due to a lack of reliable data, putting South Africa "at risk of turning into a wasteland".

This is the warning issued by the Recycling and Economic Development Initiative of South Africa (Redisa), which has stated the official data on waste in South Africa is "variously unreliable, inadequate, outdated and contradictory".

Redisa executive committee member Chris Crozier says this has led to a "crisis in environmental policymaking" due to decisions being based on "bad data".

Crozier said the organisation had looked at data provided by the department of forestry, fisheries and the environment (DFFE), which included the National Waste Information Baseline published in 2012, the State of Waste Report published in 2018 and the statistics gathered by the SA Waste Information Centre (Sawic). But he said the information was so incomplete it had "no value for most planning purposes".

Sawic is the site which hosts the SA Waste Information System on which organisations that generate, recover, treat, dispose or export waste are required to register and submit reports. This includes municipalities operating landfills.

The waste information system came into effect in 2013, but a 2022 study by master's student Masilo Sehaswana at North-West University found only a third of all registered users on the system submitted their required reports.