By Clive Mutame Siachiyako
The
content below was my comment to an article for the Earth Forum of the Times of
Zambia on the article on the implementation of the Extended Producer
Responsibility.
I salute you for your articles on the
environment. Last Monday you raised vert pertinent issues on the extended
producer responsibility (EPR). The EPR requires additional practicalities for
effective manage waste, especially Zambia where much of the waste is generated
by households. EPR is more of a Corporate Social Responsibility for producers
of goods that end up waste. It focuses on commercially generated waste. The
waste generated in homes need another care. The Lusaka City Council is using
Polluter’s Pay Principle (PPP) for household generated waste. The PPP is
premised on paying for waste collection by the generator. If you don’t pay for
it, you know where to take it.
For the EPR to be valuable, waste
management facilities are required where the waste will be sorted, stored and
transported back to producers for reuse. That is a huge undertaking. Waste if
not sorted becomes problematic to be reused by producers. For example, packs
for Shake Shake are not reusable when mixed with food products and other waste
at the waste bins. They get contaminated. In some cases, people use them as
‘toilets.’ My interaction with Manja Pamodzi and Zambian Breweries waste
management programme showed that packs used as ‘toilets’ become tricky to use
them for making other products e.g. tissue, egg trays and other items. That
brings the aspect of attitude change towards waste management. Waste management
requires systems, facilities, likeminded citizens, and plants for recycling.
The complexity of waste management
makes it a collaborative issue. When EPR is implemented, what will other
stakeholders do to make Zambia a waste free country? One of them is having recycling plants. Without
getting into the issue of where the money will come from, Zambia already has a
source of income for reducing carbon footprints. Carbon tax was introduced
worldwide to avert climatic issues. It is meant to create carbon sinks in
different ways. Since Zambia has little innovation around carbon filter
production when cars enter its market, carbon tax can be invested into other
environmental protection areas such as waste recycling, tree planting [trees
trap carbon emissions], green energy production such as solar farms to minimise
the strain resource use to generate energy [e.g. charcoal usage] has on the
environment.
Currently, according to National Road
Fund Agency (NRFA), carbon tax is used for road infrastructure. That is not the
purpose of carbon tax. It is misappropriating it. It is replicating Toll Fees.
Now that people pay Toll Fees, carbon tax proceeds can be used for its intended
purpose to protect the environment before climatic conditions make nature fail
to sustain our lives completely. We have to take action by doing what we can to
remove environmental hazards such as waste. We can build very serious recycling
plants from carbon tax. We can have effectively managed waste systems beyond
the EPR.
Zambian waste is mostly generated by
households. Lusaka generates 301, 840 tonnes of waste per year. Residential
waste accounts for 81% of that waste. This places much responsibility on
household waste management. Households waste need more attention to save the
environment, people’s health, water table, soil and air pollution and other
risks.
The EPR doesn’t apply to households.
The Lusaka City Council instead uses the Polluter’s Pay Principle for household
waste management. That system is equally badly limping for a number of reasons
as it can be seen from huge piles of waste in townships. People are mostly not
willing to pay, enforcement is weak, waste bins are limited, waste managers
(Community Based Enterprises) are badly performing in waste collection, etc.
Worse still landfills where the waste is dumped are getting full.
The Lusaka City Council has been
negotiating with Chief Mukamambo III for land in Chongwe where the Lusaka waste
could be dumped. The Chief has argued that Chongwe is a farming area, taking
waste there will expose people’s animals to waste such that some of them may
die e.g. pigs that go loose. Still, what happens when the Chongwe landfills are
full? It brings us back to your point of having recycling plants. We need to
innovate on how to reuse our waste. Waste ceases to be waste when sorted and
reused, it becomes resource for production. No one is born with sustainability
mind-set and skills. We learn and adapt into our everyday life.
Behavioural and mind-set change are
key into the waste management equation. Implementing the Polluter’s Pay
Principle hasn’t worked expectedly as people are unwilling to pay for waste
collection. In April 2016, I did a research on waste management in peri-urban
areas (particularly Mtendere), some people argued waste was the responsibility
of the Lusaka City Council. They don’t see themselves are co-managers of waste.
Some residents felt that the Polluter’s Pay Principle duplicated waste fees
payable under land and property rates. This is because waste collection fees
used to be embedded into taxes on land/property. Gone are those days with the
coming of Polluter’s Pay Principle. But people don’t see it as their duty to
pay for the waste. It’s boma [government] o do it.
Lusaka City Council and Zambia
Environmental Management Authority (ZEMA), the media and all of us (e.g.
teaching our children environmental friendly waste management practices) should
help each other change mind-set over waste management. It is our business, we
all have to do our party. We have to get involved. No one should take a back
sit. We can’t meet Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) without doing our bit
to find the solution to the waste management puzzle. The complexity of the
problem requires collectivity in getting around it. EPR can’t be a success
without systemic actions towards improving our ways of managing garbage at
households, institutional and commercial levels.
We have to do things in a different
way. We need to invest in apt infrastructure for recycling, engage in
collaborative actions, long term financing and programmes to avert
environmental problems, research and innovation on waste management, and likewise.
We shouldn’t end at making plastic bags costly, we should invest in reusable
and recyclable materials. For instance, we can invest into making shopping bags
from tree barks, sisal or reeds, which can be reused and are friendlier to the
environment when disposed as they decompose. We can create a market for people
that make baskets from either from sisal, reeds or tree barks. We can do tree
planting to replenish the forests after they use the tree barks for making
different ware for shopping. Jobs will be created, business linkages and other
business opportunities that currently depend on plastic bags.
Prudent waste management is part of
climate change mitigation and adaptation. It reduces emissions of environmental
pollutants and rids nature of gases that deplete the ozone layer. We have to
invest in recycling as you emphasized in your article on 19th December.
Landfills will get full. Smoke from burnt waste at the landfills pollutes the
environment, methane from the waste the sips into the soil pollute both the
soil and water table, people are landfills are exposed to endless pollutants,
etc. Collectively we can create products from waste, create systems to convert
waste into valuables e.g. organic fertilizer, bio-charcoal or biogas from
different types of waste via energy-recovery.
