For many organisations, sustainability is a corporate responsibility and a necessary step towards enhancing future-fitness. For others, it’s a marketing must. But in South Africa, it is a survival imperative. Nothing, if not resourceful, South Africans will often regard the urgency of the issues confronting them as a catalyst for inventive problem-solving.
Khayelitsha is a poor Cape Town settlement where jobs are few and prospects are slim. But should that preclude it from entrepreneurial opportunity?
In 2019, Distell, South Africa’s leading producer of wines, spirits, ciders and ready-to-drinks, partnered with the Western Cape’s Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning, and the Cape Town City Council, to establish GreenUp. Explains Charles Wyeth, Distell’s acting group manager of sustainability: “The goal of our private/public partnership was to start cleaning up Khayelitsha, while also generating jobs and building skills.”
The first step envisaged by GreenUp was to start clearing the area of beverage packaging and other solid waste. Waste pickers would be equipped with protective gear and custom-built trolleys and trained in collecting, separating, and processing what they describe as “post-consumer materials” for recycling.
They would also be taught financial, business, and operational skills to negotiate with and supply their pickings to recyclable buy-back centres established for the purpose. Buy-back centres would process the materials for on-sale to packaging manufacturers for the cycle to repeat itself. There are now 165 environmental assistants, as waste pickers are known, in Khayelitsha, supplying to seven buy-back centres in that area.
It is estimated environmental assistants each collect a daily average of 200 kg of recyclables that would otherwise find their way into landfills. The waste – glass and PET bottles, paper, metals, plastics – comes from households, taverns, streets and informal dumps.
