The second round of draft amendments to the extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations were released last week, compliments of environment, forestry & fisheries minister Barbara Creecy.
Now in the final round of comments, the EPR regulations are an amendment to the National Waste Act aimed at allowing the state to specify EPR measures for the electrical & electronics sector, the lighting sector and the paper & packaging sector.
The legislation is aimed at stemming the next projected crisis to face cash-strapped municipalities — rapidly diminishing landfill airspace. Airspace is the volume of space on a landfill site permitted for disposal of municipal solid waste.
EPR identifies parties responsible for the implementation of waste management reduction measures associated with the three product streams and extends producers’ responsibility for their products along the value chain, from cradle to grave and beyond, using a defined life-cycle assessment process.
For cities such as Johannesburg that have no more than five years of airspace left on any of their landfill sites, this legislation cannot come soon enough. New landfills cost more than R28m per hectare to establish, and environmental authorisations and planning permissions make them projects of many years. With landfills countrywide rapidly filling up, urgent action is required on the steadily climbing waste per capita numbers across the country.
Previous ambitious targets such as the Polokwane Declaration for Zero Waste signed by the government, civil society and business in 2001, committing SA to zero waste to landfill by 2022, have proved insignificant in the face of the challenge. A mere 10% of general waste is being recycled nationally, much of this thanks to 80,000 informal waste pickers eking out an existence off our waste.
That is an incredibly broad brushstroke that will require even some small, medium and micro-enterprises (SMMEs) to develop strategies to mitigate waste in their value chains
The historical focus on consumer education places the onus of responsibility for the waste problem at the wrong door. The consumer is at the very end of the value chain and on an individual level it is impossible to evaluate the intricately complex implications of a household’s purchasing choices on upstream and downstream waste production, especially when there is deliberate miscommunication about the recyclability of many products.
EPR will prompt the appointment of producer responsibility organisations or independent producer-led EPR schemes, which will drive sector-based waste minimisation programmes; manage finances to promote the reduction, reuse, recycling and recovery of identified products; increase awareness; and innovate new measures to reduce the potential effects of products on health and the environment.
In case you were thinking this has little do with you, reconsider. Responsible producers, in terms of the paper & packaging regulations, for example, define producers as those that “place in excess of 10 tonnes of identified products onto the market” annually, including the resale of branded goods. That is an incredibly broad brushstroke that will require even some small, medium and micro-enterprises (SMMEs) to develop strategies to mitigate waste in their value chains.
Businesses don’t have to walk this road alone. Apart from the growing number of private consultancies working on circular economy innovation, state-supported institutions such as GreenCape and the National Cleaner Production Centre have initiated free-to-join industrial symbiosis programmes in the Western Cape, Gauteng, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal, to use waste outputs from one company as a productive input in another. These facilities will prove vital for progressive businesses that want to start tweaking their value chains early on and wish to buy themselves up to five years under EPR to get their product life cycle assessments up to scratch.
While some may grumble about having to shoulder yet more responsibility in such difficult times, it shouldn’t stretch the imagination too much to see that reducing waste also has the potential to improve the bottom line.
• Maguire holds a master’s degree in global change studies from Wits and has been developing green economy solutions for the private sector, NGOs and the state for more than a decade.
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