Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 3: The politics of wasteno evident effect on reducing waste production. It also focused activist attention onthe formal dumps. Two notorious hazardous waste dumps operated by Waste-Techwere closed down following sustained campaigning: Margolis in Johannesburg andUmlazi in Durban [see Box 5]. The wretched Aloes site in Port Elizabeth, however,remains open. After a protracted struggle, the neighbouring Vermaak community wasre-housed away from the site [see Box 7].The leading corporations then started constructing new hazardous waste landfills.As usual, most were sited in poor neighbourhoods and Earthlife, together with localorganisations, opposed them with uneven success. EnviroServ got in early with itshigh hazard (H:H) Holfontein landfill which it claimed would be a Rolls-Royce site.The subsequent experience for the neighbouring settlement has been anything butluxurious. The landfill has a history of fires, leaks and spills from collapsing cell walls. 21Waste-Tech followed with the construction of Chloorkop, also slated as a Rolls-Royce,next to the Phomolong shack settlement but also close to wealthier Midrand suburbs.A protracted battle followed as diverse local communities and interests united inopposition to the landfill. The industry claimed that opposition to its dumps wasbased on the ‘not-in-my-backyard’ syndrome and was creating a crisis of hazardouswaste in the province. Activists responded that the dumps should not be in anybody’sbackyard, denounced the project as an end-of-pipe response to hazardous waste andquestioned industry’s motives for claiming a crisis when it was simultaneously lobbyingfor permission to import wastes. Finally, the dump was permitted for general waste butnot for hazardous waste [see Box 6].In KwaZulu-Natal, industry similarly claimed that the closure of Umlazi would createa hazardous waste crisis and attempted to collapse the closure process into a processfor identifying a new H:H site. Local activists rejected this out of hand. They notedthat no-one actually knew how much waste was produced and argued that a processfor identifying any new hazardous site could not be undertaken in a policy vacuum.At the same time, the experience of Umlazi consolidated awareness of the interlinkednature of environmental problems and activists from the various south Durbancommunities, hitherto separated in apartheid’s racial boxes, joined to form the SouthDurban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA).21 Enviroserv’s 2007 Annual Report records numerous complaints at Holfontein but does not give detailsof the cause of the complaints. Indeed, its ‘sustainability report’ focuses exclusively on process issues such asmanagement systems and the number of training courses for workers. It says nothing about its actual impacts onthe environment.- 42 - groundWork - Wasting the Nation