A scheme using street art, theatre and song that is aimed at reducing the open dumping and burning of waste and to increase plastic recycling has been introduced in KwaMhlanga, Mpumalanga by a team from WasteAid, a leading international development organisation and the University of Portsmouth in the UK. Rebecca Henderson from WasteAid told BizNews that the response to the project was phenomenal and they wanted to show communities they had the skills and power to create change. Dr Cressida Bowyer from the University of Portsmouth, who has successfully launched similar campaigns in Kenya, said it was a creative way of tackling the issue of plastic waste. A study in Mountain View, KwaMhlanga has found that 85% of the area’s population are open dumping or burning waste.
Looking for a strategy to tackle the plastics issue – Rebecca Henderson
We were awarded funding by Wrap UK for the International Circular Plastics flagship competition, and it’s a feasibility study. Because it’s a feasibility study, it’s quite important to have that academic prowess on top of what WasteAid do as a charity organisation and with the University of Portsmouth’s expertise through the Revolution Plastics Initiative, we were very much in line with understanding the plastics issue, as well as the creative methods to tackle that. So, having the university’s technical and academic expertise on the subject, as well as being able to provide advice on how to go about it was very beneficial to us. We really just appreciate the fact that they’ve been able to come on board and provide us with guidance in terms of the strategies that would be best suited to raise awareness in the community and the methods that are successful in doing so.
Most of the recyclable waste is transported from Mpumalanga to Gauteng
What actually happens is that most of the waste has to then get transported from Mpumalanga through to Johannesburg where it’s either processed or even sent overseas for processing. There’s not a lot of recycling, especially of plastics, that takes place here, but there are some places that are processing and making cool products that could be beneficial for our rural areas because they make, for example, irrigation pipes out of HD and LD plastics. We can use mixed plastics and polypropylene and PET to create new products like tables and chairs that could be used for our schools. There’s a lot of opportunity out there and they are definitely people on the ground doing this. However, the waste management process in Mpumalanga is very underdeveloped and a lot of the waste collectors that collect waste don’t get a lot of value from their job. They get very low rates for the recyclables because most of the waste, most of the cost is actually taken up in transport, with fuel being so expensive nowadays. We have these buyback centres and transport companies who are earning most of the money in terms of the value that can be reclaimed from the recycling process. So, what we’re trying to do here as WasteAid is to investigate how we can create more circular systems in Mpumalanga. These are of course early-stage feasibility studies. So, we’re not going to be able to solve the whole crisis in a six-month process. But what we are learning from the people out there, is that the challenge is huge. We’ve learnt from our CAF survey, which we did at the beginning of the project when we visited approximately 55 households. Within the pilot zone, which is in Mountain View in KwaMhlanga, and from that CAP survey, we did learn that at least 85% of the population are open dumping and then burning the waste.
Developing recycling awareness appropriate for particular communities – Dr Bowyer
We are using arts-based sensitisation methods to raise awareness in the community about the initiatives happening in the bigger part of the project. The area is quite typical of many towns in countries where the waste management infrastructure is poor or non-existent. What happens is that the community members typically take their household waste up to the back of the development that they live in and kind of just dump it openly. It’s a whole mixture of waste. So, you’ve got dirty nappies, you’ve got food waste, you’ve got paper cardboard and you’ve got plastics and some of this waste does actually have a value. Plastics have a value; paper and cardboard have a value and what happens is that waste collectors go round and pick out the useful or valuable pieces of waste and go and sell them and that actually provides quite an important living for quite a lot of people around the world.
So, what we really aim to do in this project is to try and improve the segregation of the waste at the household level. We’re asking people when they take their waste up to this dump site to the back of the community, we’re building a segregation bay with clearly labelled different areas for plastics and for non-recyclables with the idea that we will increase the amount of plastic that can be recycled because it won’t be mixed in with all the kind of dirty waste, residual waste. In order to promote this within the community, we’re working with local musicians, actors, and artists to develop a series of awareness-raising tools, if you like, that are socially and culturally relevant to that particular community. We’re not going in with preformed songs or preformed ideas, what we do is we go in and we identify local musicians and local artists, and we work with them to develop outputs that are both scientifically accurate, if you like, in terms of what’s recyclable and what’s not, but are also kind of engaging and appropriate for that community.
Using Ndebele art to raise awareness
We are creating a series of murals using Ndebele patterns for the borders of those murals. We’ve basically got three murals. One is very straightforward. It’s just on one side pictures of things that are recyclable and on the other side of the mural, pictures of things that aren’t recyclable. Another mural is a kind of before and after beautification of a site. So, one half of it is as it is at the moment, with waste, and then the other half is as it could be if there was no waste and there were trees planted and, you know, maybe some flowers growing. And then the third mural aims to highlight the impacts of burning waste on human health, specifically the heart and the lungs, eyes and the nose.
Communities are capable, with a little bit of help and inspiration, of saving themselves – Henderson
It’s really easy to turn to the community and blame them for the way that they’ve decided to manage their waste. But often they really left with no other choice. It’s easy in an urban environment, where waste is collected on the kerbside from your house every week. But where those services are not available due to lack of incomes and taxes that can enable municipalities to do those kinds of jobs that are also necessary, where does this come from? We can’t blame the community. We can’t blame the municipality. Where do we go from there? And really what WasteAid is all about is creating grassroots, community driven waste management strategies. What we try to do is to show the community that we don’t have to wait for handouts, we don’t have to wait for other people to come in and assist. We’ve got the power; we’ve got the actual skills and the capacity to create change in our communities on our own. And sometimes all of it, all it takes is just a little bit of support, you know, and a bit of inspiration as well and I think that’s really where the university has come in because raising that awareness at community level, showing people the power of their culture and the creative spirits to create change at their communities and really change the behaviour at community level is a powerful thing. Often in the developing world, we have that problem of dependency and then because of the problems we have with education and everything, people just are not aware of the opportunities around them. So, we’re not coming here and saying: we’re here to save you. They are capable of saving themselves. It’s just about providing an enabling environment for them and assisting them with the skills sometimes and the expertise that we can bring.
Handing power over to communities so that waste management becomes sustainable
It is very much about handing power over to the community really, because if we want solutions to be truly sustainable, they have to continue working after we’ve gone and that means it really does need ownership from the community. It’s another thing that we found really effective about using these kinds of creative methods and particularly working with local creatives to spread those messages. It really does help engender a real feeling of ownership and pride and sustainability.
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