Yakima Waner writes by email:
The first time I entered Plastic City to start my research and award-winning documentary The Harvest (2019) was March 22, 2018, and my life changed instantly.
Plastic City at the time was more secluded, safer, and quieter. It was a time where it wasn’t open to the public as much.
I feel the detour road, which has been formed due to the collapse of Main Reef Road, has become a good but equally bad thing for the community of the settlement.
Opening up the road has opened people’s eyes. The dwellers of Brakpan can now see for themselves that the community of Plastic City is not the enemy.
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They are human beings who live in a buzzing environment where their main goal is to make a living via recycling.
Plastic City is made up of homes of all types and sizes. There are families, parents, children, farmers, businesses, entrepreneurs, restaurants, double stories, pets, fashion and it’s a community with the same pattern as any other.
They are, however, constantly regarded as alien and non-worthy. The settlement has stood firmly for over a decade, with no issues with the dolomitic land, which spreads on the entire bank of the East Rand.
Wherever you stand now reading this paper, there is dolomite beneath you. The municipality and politicians have used the same excuses and stories about this community and they will continue to do so.
It saddens me that people of authority will ask their town to purposely cut off someone’s income by privately recycling. They are treating the community like a pest, if there is nothing to feed off they will go away.
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This mentality is no different to that which fuelled apartheid, the Holocaust, genocide and even the slave industry.
I feel it’s my responsibility to speak for this community and highlight this plight of xenophobia and hatred.
I have received despicable messages of hate towards this community and judgement for helping it, and our organisation, The Harvest Project, will not stop.
The opening of the road has allowed people to openly show their disrespect by driving recklessly and speeding.
Blessings Eco Preparatory School is full and we turn away many children daily due to fearful parents who are scared of working in the landfill and leaving their children who are at risk of being knocked over.
The way we treat one community affects all and this is what our leaders are supposed to be teaching us. This community is regarded infamous as is, their children will grow up and become society’s issue like any other child if not treated with respect.
These communities are not going anywhere due to their rights, according to our Constitution, and a child is a child no matter where their parents come from.
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South Africans have long forgotten how our neighbouring African countries helped us in our dark history and how we were all once upon a time immigrants except for the indigenous people of this land.
This community is taking nothing away from the residents of South Africa, it is not taking away jobs, it is creating jobs and it is not lowering any standards that the run-down town had before.
If you keep highlighting something bad and feeding it with more negativity, it will never end well. The blame of crime and everything else that no one wishes to take responsibility for is piled on the community of Plastic City.
Yes, there is crime and problems like everywhere else in South Africa, a country, which struggles with poverty.
But this settlement reduces crime, it is an environment where people are working hard and adding to the economy instead of depleting it.
I have witnessed strong, hardworking women recyclers who have recycled for hours, even finding aborted babies along the way, to make a living.
Do you think such a human being is a criminal? That is a mother who is looking after her family, not walking around town with multiple children while drinking, smoking, getting high and not educating her children.
Plastic City is not a run-down town with drugs, prostitution, begging and the perfect exhibition of self-loathing like the Brakpan CBD has become.
The illegal miners are not part of the community of Plastic City like the municipality keeps insisting. They do not live in the camp and the dwellers of Plastic City keep their distance and the increase in digging has happened because of the road closure.
I have walked beside these recyclers and I encourage them to see self-worth. They are doing a service, something we should be grateful for.
The Weltervreden Landfill Site is one of the best-maintained landfills, I believe, in South Africa because of the community of Plastic City.
The rubbish is finding its next cycle but sadly they have no support on the other side. The constant complaints of pollution, burning, fires – sadly, this is the reality for light, warmth, to clean and to recycle for this community with close to no support and very few human rights.
The burning method is used more to clean after the recycling process has been done than the actual recycling process. There is no relationship between the community of Plastic City and the sanitation department.
More dangerous notions are happening in other landfills across South Africa, apart from the eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality and the City of Ekurhuleni, most (if not all) other major cities and local municipalities across the country have no legal airspace left for their landfills and are in serious trouble, and are generating in ‘crisis mode’.
Skip bins have been provided in the past and it did alleviate the trash congestion and there is always an excuse that the community doesn’t comply and the bins were taken away.
I still offer my services to try and find better and cleaner methods to help both sides and alleviate the problems such as pollution.
I am an activist for animals and children, and I am worried for our future generations in this town, Brakpan. We should be teaching our children how to accept one another and learn to live in harmony.
Our institution integrates children from Plastic City and town and they form the most remarkable friendships. I must have faith that the seeds we plant will be enough because I believe the children of Plastic City will not become the villains they have been scripted to be.
Instead, the enemy is already in town.
