Johannesburg - A unique African-centric litter reduction campaign is underway in Nelson Mandela Bay and, once trialled and tested, will be scaled and used throughout the continent to create cleaner communities.
The marine conservation NGO Sustainable Seas Trust (SST) said its flagship litter-reduction campaign, Operation Clean Spot (OCS), aims to reduce land-based litter by up to 90% in some communities.
With its mandate to support a blue economy by helping Africa’s oceans become litter-free, the organisation wants to use OCS to combat pollution in the environment before it reaches the sea.
Trials kicked off in Nelson Mandela Bay and Jeffreys Bay, where SST is working with ward councillors, schools, households and informal waste collectors. It aims to achieve its drastic litter reduction targets by creating a waste management model for African contexts and communities and spanning all income groups while opening up revenue streams for waste collectors in the informal sector.
In terms of which communities will be targeted next, SST said they first need to interrogate the data gathered from the trials before the project is rolled out to other densely populated coastal cities like Cape Town and Durban. Inland cities and communities, like Joburg, will come later.
SST CEO Janine Osborne said they are also aiming to keep recyclable materials within the economy and out of landfills.
“In addition to working towards SST’s long-term goal of ‘Zero Waste to the Seas of Africa’, this project aims to identify easy-to-implement project design principles within a proof-of-concept model that can be used in other South African and African contexts. This is an authentically African model, with scalability and positive implications for our African partners and stakeholders,” she said.
Osborne added that waste is a challenge that reaches across the value chain, and each stakeholder must understand and embrace their specific role if African communities are to be cleaned up.
SST believes this is what is missing from many other similar projects attempting to address the issue of plastic and other waste in the environment; the work is not conducted across the entire value chain but tends to be siloed to one part of the value chain.
The scale and multi-dimensional focus of the “OCS has been piloted in the Nelson Mandela Bay area for the last year, and the next step sees OCS scaling into selected other densely populated coastal cities in SA to test the model. OCS is being trialled in different coastal cities at the same time because each community is unique in terms of how it manages its waste, and therefore, any solutions that OCS proposes need to be tailored to these unique circumstances.
The same holds true for other African communities. OCS will eventually be rolled out at a later stage. In fact, our research partners in Africa, Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association (WIOMSA ), have recently indicated that they would like to roll out OCS to their member countries in partnership with SST,” Osborne said.
She said Gauteng has the greatest resources in SA to be a clean city. Both national waste picker organisations are headquartered in Joburg.
“The beauty of OCS is that people don’t have to wait for it to roll out in their cities. We’re calling on consumers and businesses to adopt clean-up spots in their neighbourhoods and to be proactive in cleaning up their communities. Anyone can adopt their clean-up spot via our website - https://sst.org.za/operation-clean-spot/ - and they can log their clean-ups on an interactive map, which is publicly accessible,” she said.
CEO of South Africa’s longest-standing producer responsibility organisation, Petco, Cheri Scholtz, said collaborating on projects like OCS has helped to unlock the supply of recyclable materials to drive South Africa’s circular economy. “Recyclable materials have real value for everyone in the collection and recycling value chain, from the collectors who earn an income from selling these materials to the producers who ultimately use the recycled content in their products and packaging,” Scholtz said.
She added that supporting OCS is one of the ways they are building capacity in the informal collection sector and helping to integrate it into the formal value chain.
The OCS trials, which aim to wrap towards the end of the year, comprise scientific research using standardised methods to measure the volume of pollution at selected sites – referred to as baselines – and monitoring changes following interventions to clean the trial sites. Osborne said about 80% of what is recycled in South Africa is collected by waste collectors.
“This makes waste collectors an integral and fundamental part of our broader African recycling economy that should not only be recognised but celebrated. OCS not only helps reduce waste-to-landfill and litter in the environment, it can also support waste collectors by assisting to unlock the value of recyclable materials and create much-needed income opportunities,” she said.
Individuals or businesses can get involved with the OCS adopt-a-spot campaign by registering their clean-up area on the SST website at this address: sst.org.za/operation-clean-spot