Joburg residents need to separate waste

The City of Johannesburg will not introduce legislation yet to penalise residents who fail to separate waste when mandatory separation starts next month. Instead, the city wants to encourage behavioural change.

The city’s landfill sites are filling up and could reach maximum capacity in six years’ time.

The city now requires residents to separate waste at “source” so that dry recyclable waste such as plastic, paper, metal and glass can be separated from other household waste before it is collected by the city’s service providers.

The mandatory implementation will start in designated wards in areas such as Midrand, Waterval, Norwood, Marlboro and Soweto.

Nico de Jager, the member of the mayoral committee for environmental affairs, said separation at source has been a policy of the city for a time long but is only now being implemented.

It has, however, not made its way into the city’s bylaws.

FIRST YOU WANT TO ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO PARTICIPATE THROUGH INCENTIVES AND NOT DISINCENTIVES

Pikitup MD Lungile Dhlamini said during a media briefing on Wednesday that although separation was mandatory, people had to “be won over”.

He said the challenges were behavioural, adding that some people “budget for fines and they continue their behaviour”.

They would be looking at how the bylaws could be amended to encourage residents to work with the city.

Dhlamini said some people would copy what other people were doing.

They were looking at the “ultimate goal” of a “pay as you throw” concept that would work like a rebate system.

“So first you want to encourage people to participate through incentives and not disincentives,” he said.

“We will do that through the bylaws,” he said.

As for informal waste reclaimers in the city, De Jager said the separation at source would benefit them as the waste would already be separated and they would not have to dig through rubbish for recyclable materials.

He said the city was, among other ideas, also discussing mobile buy-back centres where the waste reclaimers could then sell their waste.

The city wanted reclaimers to register with it and become part of a designated forum.