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South Africa’s landfills are nearing capacity. When we recycle, we divert valuable resources from ending up as waste in landfill. This also preserves what we have and creates opportunities for the collection and recycling industry. There’s too much at stake not to do everything we can to recycle.
Natural resources like water, air, coal, oil, and minerals are valuable. A barrel of oil or a seam of coal takes millions of years to form. Renewable resources like forests and fresh water can only replenish if we give them the time and space to do so. But there’s one resource we keep overlooking not because it lacks value, but because we’ve been taught to treat it as waste.
According to the Global Recycling Foundation, recyclable materials like paper, cardboard, plastic, glass, and metal now sit alongside the six traditional natural resources. It’s known as the Seventh Resource for good reason. Paper comes from trees. Plastic is made from crude oil. These materials aren’t separate from nature; they’re a continuation of it.
Global Recycling Day, celebrated each year on 18 March, is a reminder that recycling is essential to preserving nature. This year, we used Global Recycling Day and the entire month of March to raise awareness about doing whatever it takes to get recyclables to the right place. The right place is where someone can process the material so it can be recycled into something new. Like an Mpact Recycling branch or dealer.
Getting recyclables to the right place shouldn’t be challenging. In fact, collecting for recycling is the easy part. The hard part is scale, because recycling only makes economic sense when there’s enough volume. And to get that volume, we need you to do your bit.
Separate and recycle, whatever it takes.
Things that don’t belong in the waste bin shouldn’t end up there. Recyclables don’t belong in the environment, so don’t leave them behind. And they certainly don’t belong in landfill, so don’t send them there or put them on the path that leads there.
It’s taken us 58 years to build our circular economy and recycling value chain at Mpact. Nowadays, practically anyone off the street can pick up cardboard boxes, pieces of paper, or plastic bottles and sell it to us for cash. Recycling is a real business that creates opportunities for real people. And in South Africa, with an unemployment rate of 32%, recycling becomes something our youth and unemployed can do to earn money.
In 2022, according to Plastics SA, there were 273 recycling operations in South Africa. Many of the people behind these businesses start out with just a trolley or a small bakkie, collecting recyclables like cardboard, paper, and plastic. People like Ezekiel Ramashia started as a waste picker and worked his way up as a general worker at Mpact Recycling. 20 years later, he is now the founder of Booysens Buy-Back Centre and is contracted to sell recyclables to Mpact Recycling. In our country, people and recycling are interconnected, and the one simply can’t work without the other.
Recycling is like a never-ending relay race. Each recyclable is passed from person to person until it reaches the place where it can be turned into something new. What you do with your recyclables determines whether they’re given a second life or buried in a landfill. Take the Bisasar Road landfill in Durban. It opened in 1980 to hold 23 million cubic metres of waste. By 2012, it had just 4 million cubic metres left to fill. Imagine how much space could have been saved if it hadn’t been filled with material that could have been recycled? Today, South Africa has over 540 landfill sites, most nearing capacity. How many of these have tonnes of recyclable material buried in them?
Recycling starts with you, separating recyclables from waste at home. Here’s how.
Want to take it a step further and make money from recycling? You can start a recycling business, like a buy-back centre. Here’s how.
The world won’t stop if we don’t recycle. But it could run a lot better. So, do whatever it takes to recycle.
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