Statutory Instrument on implementing EPR

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.