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AfriForum today released their dumping site audit report and presented it to Edna Molewa, Minister of Environmental Affairs, at the Department of Environmental Affairs in Pretoria. Nosipho Ngcaba, the Department’s Director General, and Mark Gordon, Deputy Director General of Chemicals and Waste Management, received the report on her behalf and undertook to respond within 30 days.

This comes after the civil rights organisation in June and July this year audited dumping sites in areas where AfriForum branches exist, and recorded the results in a report.

According to relevant laws and regulations, including the National Environmental Management Act: Waste (Act. no. 59 of 2008), a dumping site must comply with specific requirements. AfriForum processed these requirements in 25 questions and used these questions to perform the dumping site audit.

According to Chris Boshoff, Project Coordinator of this project, the findings in the report show that only 18% (15 of 83) of the dumping sites that were audited, meet the minimum requirements set by the relevant legislation. “At 82% of these dumping sites, quick intervention is necessary to prevent health issues in surrounding communities.”

Boshoff lists the following troubling issues that have been found at several dumping sites:

• Illegal medical waste is dumped at the sites, with the result that underground water may be contaminated.
• It has come to light that there are families with children living on some of the sites.
• Animals were found grazing on dumping sites, eating the waste.
• Animal carcasses that were dumped illegally and not covered, as the regulation stipulates, were also found on some of the sites.
• Finally, it was found that poor rehabilitation and compaction take place at the sites, with the result that waste is drifting around, polluting the surrounding areas.

Boshoff adds that AfriForum, as part of this project, did audits on three privately managed dumping sites as well. “Two of the sites complied with the requirements 100%, while the third scored a percentage of 76; as opposed to government-controlled dumping sites that achieved an average of 44.3% in the audit.”

Marcus Pawson, Head of Local Government and Environmental Affairs at AfriForum, believes that the shocking state of government-controlled dumping sites in South Africa can be attributed to poor management, corruption and inadequate training of municipal officials and workers. “Dumping sites in fact have a lot of potential, provided that government takes a conscious decision to make the infrastructure sustainable for recovery and reuse.”

This is how dumping sites in the various provinces performed in terms of the minimum requirements:

“AfriForum has already sent letters of demand to all municipalities where dumping sites do not meet the necessary requirements, and insisted that the municipalities provide us with their plans of action to get dumping sites on standard again. If the municipalities do not comply with this, AfriForum will assist the community to rehabilitate the dumps themselves, where possible,” says Pawson.

Join this initiative by sending an SMS with the name of your town to 45354 (R1 per SMS) – in this way you can help keep your environment clean and tidy.

• report attached.

Issued by Afriforum