Waste dumping costs City of Cape Town R500 million a year
|Published
Cape Tow - The City of Cape Town spends a staggering R500 million each year to deal with the illegal dumping of household waste in and around the Mother City.
Mayco member for urban waste management, Grant Twigg, said the City – in an effort to deal with what he described as a crisis – had launched a campaign to get communities to clean up their act.
Now, a total of 75 Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) recruits are to spearhead an intensive anti-dumping campaign across various suburbs this coming week.
The initiative will involve door-to-door engagements with residents, dynamic exhibitions and interactive sessions with local schools, as well as targeted awareness and education efforts aimed at informal traders.
It will also include community-focused activities such as litter-picking, which the City hopes will instil a sense of community ownership of public areas and pride in maintaining clean public spaces.
The EPWP provided the recruits in an effort to help spread the message and promote a cleaner Cape Town.
Twigg said that communities across all 21 sub-councils were being engaged over the project’s lifecycle – from July 2022 to next month – and to date the team had engaged almost 14 500 households.
Speaking to the Weekend Argus, Twigg said that visits to various dumping hot spots, such as Joe Slovo, Dunoon, Khayelitsha and Lakeside, found that homeowners who sublet their properties had not made adequate provision for waste removal.
“What we find is that some homeowners – not all – have sublet spaces on their properties for the erection of backyard dwellings. On one property you find there is the main house then up to seven other households on the same property, with one wheelie bin as the owners do not want to apply for an additional bin.
“This means the household waste generated on the property exceeds what the bin can hold and so the excess is just dumped on street corners or on open public spaces. At one place in Dunoon we found that the building consisted of 19 units but there were only two bins. Now that is not adequate.”
He said the campaign not only addressed the pressing issue of illegal dumping, but also created valuable short-term employment opportunities for job seekers.
He said teams were also conducting assessments where households are in need of extra bins, to ensure there would be less dumping.
“Each year the department spends about R500m on addressing illegal dumping and this has become a crisis because that budget could be spent on the beautification of public spaces to other services to our communities.
“We are calling on residents to do the responsible thing and apply for extra bins and help us get the waste off the streets. In the long term it benefits everyone and avoids the health risks caused by dumping.”