More than 100 senior industry and business managers attended the City’s waste minimisation summit in Cape Town in April, in order to identify common issues that need creative and co-ordinated solutions to minimise waste and its effects on our precious resources.

“Waste doesn’t go away by itself,” noted Barry Coetzee, Summit Co-ordinator and the City’s Manager for Integrated Waste Management Strategy Policy and By-laws. “But when that waste has economic value, and a market, we’ll see significant reductions in waste to landfill.” Coetzee was not talking about the use of “waste” in arts and crafts, but in sophisticated industrial and manufacturing processes (in the glass, plastics and packaging arenas), as well as in the production of fuels and energy. Reuse of materials saves greatly on the costs of energy, waste and water, and one of the roles of the City is to facilitate this reuse, said Coetzee. “As a City we don’t actually process waste, but we need to enable waste processing to happen more quickly and more simply.”

Cape Town has significant waste problem, and it’s growing out of proportion to the city’s in-migratory population. Waste-to-landfill is increasing by 7%, yet the net population increase is only 2% per year. Part of the solution lies in developing partnerships with commerce and industry, particularly where these partnerships will create opportunities for further economic growth and job creation. Hence the waste minimisation summit, which met with key groups in the packaging industry (glass, plastics, cans and papers), demolition companies, e-waste, the lighting industry, large retail groups and mall managers, and the tourism sector, among others.

An important aim of the summit was to initiate partnerships and implement practices that will lead to implementation of long-term sustainable waste minimisation practices; create economic benefit and opportunities on a wide scale; and divert larger volumes of waste from landfill.

Delegates in the waste minimisation summit considered three questions:

• What should the City of Cape Town be doing to facilitate more recycling?
  
• How can effective value chains and practical mechanisms be created to enable recycling that will effectively divert larger volumes of valuable waste from landfills? What can be done to enable/improve/ facilitate new investments that will stimulate job growth in both the formal and informal economies?
  
• How can waste be recovered more effectively at public places such as in CBDs, and malls, and at places of leisure and large events (social, cultural, sport, business, etc)?