Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 6: Down at the dumpseThekwini has pretty much completed that process. Msunduzi is just starting out withits brutal exclusion of waste pickers while tendering out the contract for the recyclingfacility. Further down the municipal hierarchy, Emfuleni and Sasolburg representdivergent responses. The initiatives at Palm Springs are possible precisely becausethe dump is informal and because the municipality ignores waste, leaving Loate toact on his own very considerable initiative. At Sasolburg, in contrast to Msunduzi,Metsimaholo has fenced the reclaimers in rather than out in order to facilitate theappropriation of their pickings.‘Green’ initiatives such as recycling and CDM projects appear as prime candidates forprivatisation. Ironically, this might be producing the kinds of business opportunitiesthat will give waste a higher profile in council. Thus, there are rumours that Msunduzicouncillors have business interests in the New England Road recycling facility whileenforcing the Remade-Phutang contract on the reclaimers seems pretty much thebeginning and end of Metsimaholo’s interest. That it appears to have acted at Sasol’sinstigation is perhaps testimony to the local politics of patronage.At the same time, the ‘green’ opportunities are drawing municipal managers into thewider circuits of ecological modernisation – particularly CDM, following the successof eThekwini – creating links to global institutions and giving waste a shade of glamourthat it previously lacked. Thus, eThekwini mayor, Obed Mlaba was quoted by theWorld Bank’s Prototype Carbon Fund:I think the example we are setting in Durban, working with the WorldBank to deal with landfill, is a huge innovation. We are turning dirt andgarbage into a raw material that we could grow wealth from. If you wantedto say to yourself, ‘we want to be the cleanest city in the world’ waste, in myview, is the best place to start. [quoted in Patel 2008]Ecological modernisation is here associated with the broader project of neo-liberalglobalisation, CDM being regarded in most southern countries as another channelfor foreign direct investment with fierce competition for projects, accompanied bycomplaints that Africa is losing out on this as on other investment.The priority given to capital similarly makes recycling a thing of the markets. Prior tothe commodities boom, only the waste pickers did it, finding value at the point wherethe formal market – or capital – has terminated all value. The character of waste atWasting the Nation - groundWork - 177 -