IN Zimbabwe, the mandate to ensure that the environment is kept in a sustainable condition falls under the Ministry of Environment, Climate and Wildlife, along with respective municipalities of each particular area.
Indeed, the environment should be kept in a state, which is not harmful to the wellbeing and health of citizens. It should also be protected for the benefit of future generations.
In order to achieve that, the country, therefore, needs to have functional waste management systems.
Waste management refers to the practice of collecting, transporting, processing, disposing and strategising over issues pertaining to various waste materials, which are produced by households and businesses.
For clarity, this article focuses on solid waste (refuse), which must be differentiated from waste water (sewage).
According to the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association (Zela), Zimbabwe generates over 1,9 million tonnes of waste each year. About 50% of household waste is food leftovers, with paper and plastics also making a sizable portion.
Only 10% of generated waste goes to recycling, composting, reusing and other value addition processes. Plastic makes up 18% (or 342 000 tonnes) of total waste generated nationally.
There are also several laws and policies, which are aimed at addressing the management of waste in the country. These include; Environmental Management: Effluent and solid waste disposal regulations; environmental management, plastic packaging and plastic bottles regulations; Urban Councils Act and Rural District Councils Act; Environmental Management Agency Strategic Plan (2021-2025); the Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan (2015-2020); the Harare Integrated Solid Waste Management Strategic Plan (2021- 2025); and others.
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Challenges
Waste management in Zimbabwe faces numerous challenges. Firstly, there is a pronounced backlog of waste services in the country. Respective municipalities have failed to successfully manage even waste collection services.
In Harare, central government indicated its intention to take up the responsibility to collect and dispose waste from June 2024, arguing that the municipality has failed to uphold its mandate in this area.
Bins in Harare’s Central Business District (CBD) are regularly neglected and the area is frequently an eyesore due to the filth and chaos caused by uncollected trash, among other things.
Residential areas within the Harare have also been left to figure out their own waste management plans on their own. Trash is not collected by the authorities, leaving residents to incinerate (burn), or illegally dump their garbage at disposal sites that do not meet basic environmental standards.
As the capital city (of Harare) struggles with waste management, the situation is similarly terrible for smaller cities and informal settlements. Among other things, poor waste management leads to the depreciation of property values and exposure of residents to life-threatening illnesses such as cholera.
Also, waste, which is illegally dumped, can end up polluting ground water and rivers, leading to the deterioration of borehole and municipal water.
Secondly, there is currently an increased complexity of the type of waste being produced by households and businesses because of urbanisation and industrialisation.
Waste electrical and electronic products (also known as e-waste) such as microwaves, stoves, television sets, fridges, cell phones, computers, etc, are an example of an emerging type of waste, which can be greatly hazardous. Unfortunately, there are no local policies designed to tackle e-waste, as yet.
Electrical and electronic waste products are notorious for harmful chemicals which they are constituted of such as lead, mercury, dioxins, nickel, barium and chromium, among others.
Inappropriate recycling of e-waste is a threat to public health and safety. Also, burning, dismantling by waste pickers without protective clothing, dumping in water bodies or the leaching of its harmful toxins into groundwater or rivers (from landfills), can cause damage to human blood, kidneys, as well as central and peripheral nervous systems, etc.
Thirdly, growing population means that the volume of waste, which is being generated is set to gradually and certainly increase as the years go by.
The incremental positive changes in economic growth also point to greater generation of waste, as households businesses and the government use and consume more goods, in line with economic growth. This puts pressure on waste management facilities, which are already in short supply.
Fourthly, there is a limited understanding of the main waste types and the national waste balance in the country because the submission of waste data (by households and businesses) is neither obligatory nor consistent.
In South Africa, for example, in 2017 some of the largest waste streams (types) comprised; organic waste, construction and demolition waste, metals, and glass waste, which were 19 million tonnes, 4,5 million tonnes, four million tonnes and three million tonnes, respectively. This kind of data is useful because it can be used to attract recyclers to invest in recycling companies for a particular waste stream which may have sufficient inputs (waste) for them to profitably recycle.
Waste management infrastructure such as landfills (official dumping grounds), waste collection trucks, recycling infrastructure, etc, is also both in a poor condition and in limited supply. There is a need for more compliant landfills and management facilities for hazardous waste.
The country’s recyclers also have limited capacity. They are only able to recover a few basic waste streams such as steel, a small range of plastics, etc.
Furthermore, waste management suffers from under-pricing, which means that the total costs of disposing waste are not fully charged on households and industry.
That means waste collection is subsidised, and it generally runs at a loss, each year. It also means that illegal dumpers of waste are generally not apprehended and when caught, they are not fined in a manner which reflects the extent of damage which they are inflicting on society and the environment.
As a result, waste disposal, including illegal dumping, are preferred by locals, over other options of waste recovery such as; reducing waste at the source, recycling, compositing, waste-to-energy power plants, etc.
Suggestions
There is an urgent need for the country’s laws to be re-designed such that both businesses and households are forced to reduce their generation of waste, which is meant for disposal at landfills.
In other words, Zimbabweans should generate as little waste as possible. In order to achieve this, the government may direct that all biodegradable waste (such as food, etc) at business or household level, should be composted.
An exception may, however, be made for entities, which do not have the capacity to do so, such as residents of flats (apartments) that do not have enough land for composting.
Such laws will be particularly important since municipal authorities have clearly failed to consistently and predictably collect waste. Reducing the amount of waste, which should be collected by municipal authorities, would in effect give municipalities some breathing space to be able to provide competent and predictable waste services.
Laws may further prohibit the mixing of certain types of waste streams. That means that certain types of waste streams should be organised separately, at both household and business level.
For example waste streams of plastics, steel, glass, etc, may be required to be organised separately at both household and business level. Moreover, the aforementioned waste streams may also be prohibited from being included in waste, which should be collected by municipal refuse trucks.
Instead, a network of community workers would then be mandated to gather these waste streams from households and businesses at a community or localised level.
Alternatively, those who produce the waste can be required to drop their waste at nearby collection centres, which may be at the nearest service centres (shopping malls).
Thereafter, these waste streams can then be warehoused on behalf of recyclers. This can help recycling companies to easily access raw materials for their recycling plants, from these service centres.
Overall, such laws would also reduce the quantity of waste meant for collection by municipal authorities.
As a measure to curb illegal dumping, municipal authorities need to use both technology and community involvement. Hidden video cameras with facial recognition capabilities may be placed at illegal dumping sites.
Whenever an individual is caught in the process of dumping, community members who live close to the site may be tasked to initiate the process of identifying the perpetrator.
This means that, if someone illegally dumps waste, they might be able to leave the scene of the offence at that moment but they will eventually be identified, arrested and fined.
The government needs to have a policy which effectively and responsibly addresses waste electrical and electronic products (e-waste).
For instance, all such products (such as microwaves, cellphones, television sets, etc) may also be mandated to be temporarily warehoused at local service centres (shopping malls), in suitable facilities.
This means that the country needs widely accessible e-waste collection depots. Thereafter, recyclers of the e-waste can then collect it from such central points, after it has been gathered on their behalf.
Imports of second-hand electrical and electronic products should also be regulated. It is not uncommon for advanced economies to export their e-waste to Africa for landfilling.
In some cases, the exports are reportedly disguised as donations and comprise an assortment of functional, repairable and completely broken down electrical and electronic products. Such problems are particularly troublesome in Ghana and other West-African nations.
Zimbabwe will, therefore, need to pre-emptively prepare for those kinds of challenges. Landfilling of e-waste, burning, or dumping it in water bodies must be prohibited, with severe penalties charged for violators of such regulations.
Recyclers and processors of problematic waste streams such as e-waste, construction and demolition waste, tyres, slag, fly ash and bottom ash, certain types of plastics, hazardous refuse, or biomedical waste, should be offered tax incentives.
They may be required to pay zero corporate tax. This would encourage more investments in recycling whilst also providing jobs for locals. Citizens would also benefit from the resultant cleaner, safer and habitable environment. More waste-to-energy power plants should be established in the country.
Harare and Bulawayo may need one new waste-to-energy power station for each one of them. Waste-to-energy plants use refuse from municipal landfills as fuel for incineration (burning), which is required for boiling water, whose steam is used to turn turbines that generate electricity.
Waste-to-energy power stations help to reduce the size of a country’s landfills, where waste is piled up if it has not been recycled.
The power plants are also popular for recovering useful waste streams, which they cannot successfully burn, such as steel, which can eventually be directed to their respective recyclers and kept within the economy.
At the present moment, Geo Pomona Waste Management (Pvt) Ltd, is set to be Zimbabwe’s first waste-to-energy power station. It is currently in the construction phase.
The government can also subsidise smaller municipalities (including those in rural areas) whose budgets cannot support viable waste management services.
Such small municipalities should also be encouraged to collaborate with larger towns and cities, for example, through diverting their own waste to the large cities, etc.
Tertiary educational institutions, the government and private sector should also be encouraged to continually carry out research on how to recover value from problematic waste streams.
Deeper research into the recycling of tyres, for example, may lead to them being used as a significant input in the manufacturing of asphalt, which is critical for road construction.
To combat littering in public spaces, the use of anti-litter monitors by Harare’s municipality, should be emulated in other cities. Harare’s anti-litter monitors are a group of volunteers, who collect litter and empty bins, throughout the city’s Central Business District.
The monitors also advise the public not to litter and report offenders to nearby Environmental Management Agency officers, who have the authority to fine and arrest people who litter.
In order to make the monitors a permanent part of waste management, people who serve as anti-litter monitors for six months or longer, should be preferred for government jobs whenever they arise.
- Tutani is a political economy analyst — [email protected].
