Drive past almost any informal settlement, or any South African neighbourhood on the urban fringe, and you will most likely encounter a grim sight: mounds of waste tyres.
These toxic monuments to our throwaway culture are not just eyesores, they leach chemicals into our ground water, and, most catastrophically, fuel hard-to-extinguish fires that spew poisonous fumes into the air.
Every now and then waste tyres do manage to make the news. A few years ago, the Cape Town community was stunned to read about dozens of pupils being absent from a Belhar school every week because of headaches, throat infections and respiratory problems. The cause: nearby fires to extract the scrap metals from certain types of tyres.
In 2023 a veld fire was caused by illegal tyre-burning near Lilianton in Boksburg. According to the local residents, tyre-burning for scrap has taken place regularly for at least the past five years ̶ and this particular time, it got out of hand.
Incidents at waste tyre storage depots also occasionally make the news. The 2023 fire at the Lichtenburg Waste Tyre Depot should be seen as a dire warning. A shroud of noxious black smoke covered kilometres of the Northwest landscape, causing environmental damage that still hasn’t been adequately calculated.
The Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) seems to be aware of the crisis. Recently, Minister Dion George withdrew a fatally flawed Industry Waste Tyre Management Plan (IndWTMP) which would have worsened the critical situation. The creation of a brand-new plan must now begin, and it is a moment for all stakeholders to address the situation before another more devastating tyre pollution disaster occurs.
Illegal burning
Whether it is the tyre mounds dumped in and around neighbourhoods, the illegal burning of tyres, or the overfull waste depots under management of the Waste Bureau of the DFFE, these problems all ask a truly disturbing question of all those who witness it: if South Africa cannot manage waste tyres − arguably the easiest of all waste streams to manage and make them economically valuable through recycling − how are we managing more complex and even more dangerous waste streams, such as e-waste, chemical waste, medical waste and nuclear waste?
Just how badly South Africa’s waste streams are managed is not something that can be clearly answered. The Recycling and Economic Development Initiative of South Africa (REDISA) has found that official data on waste streams in South Africa is variously unreliable, inadequate, outdated and contradictory. This has, over years, resulted in a crisis in environmental policymaking, simply because bad data cannot result in good policy.
The data used by the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) − most notably the National Waste Information Baseline (NWIB), the State of Waste Report (SoWR), and the information gathering around waste statistics by the South African Waste Information Centre (SAWIC) − is old, contradictory, contains many errors, and uses incompatible definitions. Where it is current, such as in SAWIC, the information is so incomplete that it is meaningless. If SAWIC is to be believed, in 2023 only 5 000 tonnes of plastic waste ended up in landfill, when all reasonable calculations point to 100 times that amount.
The DFFE figures on waste tyres are also not credible. They have remained constant (when they are specified at all) since 2019, at 170 266 tonnes a year. REDISA has calculated that the actual figures must vary between 253 984 tonnes and 259 225 tonnes.
Replaced by no data
One highly indicative example, out of the many waste data errors found, concerns medical waste. According to SAWIC, the Western Cape alone generated 1.8 million tonnes of medical waste in 2023. This is 12 times as much as the entire UK National Health Service. So, either the data is disastrously wrong, or someone might be paid to treat phantom medical waste. It should be noted that following a major revision of the SAWIC website earlier this year, the wildly inaccurate or incomplete data has been replaced by no data − the statistical information is no longer published.
Addressing tyres is the first step in addressing South Africa’s wider waste crisis. Waste tyres offer an opportunity to get the basics right, before more specialised waste is addressed. Yet, a solution – an elegantly simple, economically powerful, and environmentally restorative solution – lies not in some futuristic technology, but in a past initiative the Zuma government of 2017 carelessly and illegally abandoned.
Between 2013 and 2017, waste tyres were managed through a REDISA model focused on establishing a circular economy through recycling. 22 tyre collection centres were built, more than 3 000 people were employed, 226 small waste enterprises were created, and 59 000 tons of CO2 emissions were offset. The model was funded by an industry levy on all new tyres sold. While this levy is still being collected, nobody – not the tyre industry, not the average citizen, not waste entrepreneurs – is experiencing the benefits achieved eight years ago.
It is essential that the government fast-track the establishment of a new Industry Waste Tyre Management Plan. Not just as an urgent way of dealing with the crisis, but also as a way of establishing a model that can be applied to South Africa’s other waste streams.
We have done it before: dependable data, precise tracking, the empowerment of collectors and transporters, and the channelling of waste to recyclers for the creation of new products. We must do it again.
The longer we take to answer the relatively simple problem of waste tyres, the longer we will stay away from addressing the difficult problems posed by complex waste.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/vanmelis/14920927093]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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