Think Twice, the City of Cape Town’s free household rubbish recycling project has become a permanent service in certain areas of Cape Town.

From now on, participating households in the Parklands, Melkbosstrand, Bloubergstrand, Pinelands and Helderberg areas as well as Gordon’s Bay, Strand, Somerset West and Macassar will be able to put their recyclable waste into a free City-issued bag and place it in their wheelie bins on the usual collection days. The bagged recyclables will be collected by a City contractor, Waste Plan, which will take them to a materials recovery facility for reprocessing.

Think Twice was launched as a pilot project in November 2007 to encourage participating households to ‘think twice’ before they disposed of their rubbish. Its primary aim was to encourage them to separate their waste at source into recyclables with potential economic value. The project was motivated by the pressing need to reduce the amount of waste that goes to landfill. Of the city’s six landfills, three have closed and the remaining landfills are filling up fast. Each faces different closure times: Bellville South is expected to close in 2013; Vissershok South in 2010;Vissershok North in 2017 and Coastal Park in 2017.

Although another landfill has been planned, this is situated over 40 km further away than the current sites, and the increased distance will impact on waste disposal costs considerably. As each person generates an average of 2kg waste per day, the need to minimise waste is urgent.

To date, Think Twice has diverted in excess of one million kilograms of waste away from the city’s landfills.

The service has a number of economic spin offs. Many companies – ranging from one man operations to large multinationals – operate on the principle of one person’s garbage being another person’s gold’ by using waste materials in their manufacturing processes. Resin Roof Tiles, for example, uses the plastic that computer monitors are made of to manufacture South African National Standards (SANS) approved roof tiles. Nampak Tissue uses white waste office paper to make many of the tissue and toilet paper products that are found on supermarket shelves.

Many community projects use waste materials to make saleable products, such as the Clover Mama Africa project, which creates useful items from the fabric off-cuts generated by the CapeStorm clothing factory.

The service also has the potential to create employment. In Pinelands for example, a group of informal rubbish collectors have been formally employed to keep roads cleansed when rubbish is collected and assist with sorting waste at source.

Think Twice also prevents the carbon emissions that would have been generated in making the items from new raw materials.

Households wishing to know more about the Think Twice service can contact:

Waste Plan (the City’s Think Twice contractor):
Bertie Lourens, e-mail: bertie@wasteplan.co.za
Council Area Manager: Tseko Magubane, tel: 021 400 5256
Solid Waste Call Centre: 086 045 6786

Participating households should only dispose of ‘dry waste’ into the bags. This includes clean and dry paper, cardboard, plastic bags, containers and bottles, glass and tin cans. Caps need to be removed from plastic containers, and plastic and metal containers need to be flattened. The bag must be placed in the top half of the wheelie bin. All other waste, such as polystyrene, tetrapacks (e.g. long life milk), wet paper and food waste goes into the bottom half.

Communities who are not in Think Twice areas are encouraged to take their recyclables to the nearest City drop off facility, school, NGO or recycling organisation.