SA Waste Management Strategy Making Progress
Wednesday, 06 October 2010 |  Christy van der Merwe  |  0 comment

The Department of Environmental Affairs would meet the two-year target of developing the National Waste Management Strategy (NWMS) according to the outlined action plan, a government official said on Tuesday.

Gauteng portfolio committee for agriculture and rural development chairperson Nokuthula Sikhakhane said that the government has already published a draft strategy and received public comments on the document.

The NWMS sought to establish a common platform for action between stakeholders to improve waste management in South Africa. It was a legislative requirement of the National Environmental Management: Waste Act, which was promulgated on July 1, 2009.

The New Waste Act in South Africa has introduced a number of new standards that are being put in place for waste management.

"We hope to shed some light on what the implications are for organisations with regards to these new standards," said Institute of Waste Management of Southern Africa (IWMSA) president Stan Jewaskiewitz at the start of the 20th biennial waste management conference WasteCon 2010.

Jewaskiewitz welcomed the "much improved, very good legislation for the environment and waste management". However, he highlighted that problems existed in the implementation, and said that service delivery, collection and disposal were hampered by backlogs, which meant that waste was piling up - particularly in rural and informal areas in South Africa.

He said that the major challenges facing the industry were a lack of experienced and qualified staff, as well as the lack of finance and budget to carry out the waste management duties.

Jewaskiewitz emphasised that to achieve desired service levels, the private sector, and local government must strive to assist government with the implementation of the legislation.

The key to this lay in starting with education and basic skills, and the IWMSA was assisting with training and workshops at the South African local government association to develop this platform for sustainable waste management.

Discussing the effect of the new standards on organisations, IWMSA central region chairperson Suzan Oelofse explained that the standards were being drafted as regulations, thus they had legal standing, as opposed to the minimum requirements documents that were only guidelines.

"All landfills including un-permitted sites will, therefore, now be subject to these standards. This will have huge compliance implications as the containment barriers are also significantly different to what was previously included in the minimum requirements documents."

The classification system for waste had also changed. All waste streams, except those that were pre-classified in the regulations, would have to be re-classified using the new system within 18 months of the effective date of the regulations.

The most significant change was that analysis of both total concentration and leachable concentration was required. The onus for classification of the waste rested with the waste generator. These new regulations would have financial implications to all waste generators and operations managers, IWMSA said.