Today, nearly every one of South Africa’s estimated 52.98 million people will dump rubbish of some sort.
It is a globally recognised trend that consumers contribute to the cost of packaging and because of modern lifestyles, consumers don’t have much of a choice in the matter. Who wants to wander around a shopping centre with raw meat tucked into one pocket, a handful of baked beans and tomato sauce in one hand and a potato in the other?
Therefore, consumers are caught between a rock and a hard place. The Packaging Council of South Africa (PACSA) estimated the total revenue generated by South Africa’s packaging industry at about R40 billion a year. Plastic packaging made up about R20 billion, paper packaging R12 billion, with the balance made up by glass and metal packaging.
According to a BMI Foodpack 2011 report, South Africans consumed an estimated 2.8 million tons of packaging. If it weren’t for the billions of Rands spent in the advertising and marketing industries, how would we know what was in our baked beans, who made them, and why we should like them? Also, how would we store them if we didn’t want to eat them there and then? So we pay our 45 cents for a plastic bag to carry our groceries to the car, and another R30 for a roll of ten plastic bags to dispose of all the wrapping our groceries and day-to-day items arrive in.
We then pay our municipalities hundreds of Rand’s to remove the unsightly mess from our property. And then we go out the next day and do it all over again.
“At this year’s Discovery Walk the Talk I estimate we picked up about 30 tons of waste,” said Chris Erwee. He runs Recycle Drive in Linden and said recycling was no longer an option as the city was running out of landfill space. His focus is on businesses, no matter its output, and he aims to maximise recycling and review areas where waste can be minimised. “If we are responsible citizens who take an interest in the environment, we really don’t have a choice.”
According to PACSA, in 2010 South Africans consumed 3.562 million tons of packaging and recycled 1.74 million tons, which represented a 49 percent recovery rate. Furthermore, 193 recyclers in South Africa converted an estimated 183 000 tons of product using recycled plastic packaging and the demand for good quality plastic waste currently exceeds supply. If we look back at the packaging industry contribution of R40 billion a year to the economy, somebody is living large off the trash of the land. It’s not the consumer, and certainly not the recyclers who use our parks and sidewalks as sorting stations. The real question is, what is the cost if we don’t reduce, reuse, and recycle?
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