Until now, Mondi’s kerbside paper pick-up service has had just one weakness: they collected every other week. It was a bit of a mental challenge to remember whether the last collection date was one week ago or two.
Strain your brain no longer. I just received a notice in my mailbox that starting October 1 Mondi will now collect weekly in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban. (Unfortunately the recycling service does not operate in other cities.) If you don’t know which day of the week they visit your neighbourhood, look for orange bags on the pavement, phone 0800 022 112, or visit www.paperpickup.co.za.
Getting an orange bag takes some effort. Ask for one by phone, and leave a pile of newspapers at the kerb—weighed down by a brick—with a sign begging for a bag. Be persistent. If you’re not sure what can and cannot go in the bag, see this post. The recyclables list is so long that even if you don’t subscribe to a daily newspaper you may be able to fill a bag each week.
The trucks that collect the paper are owned and operated by small businesses, frequently new black entrepreneurs. I traveled around the suburbs for an afternoon with one of them and saw how frustrating it was for him when he would turn his truck down a street and see just a single bag on the kerb—or none at all. With the added convenience of weekly pick-up, every block should now be glowing with orange bags once a week.
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May 9th, 2008 at 12:25 am
You need to visit Sedgefield. We have local a recycling contractor, Rejoice, who is full of initiative. I put a green bag out with my black bag. It is collected and the contents sorted for sale. At one time Sedgefield had the highest per capita recycling rate in the country, I believe.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:52 am
I’m fascinated. Both Cape Town and Johannesburg have run pilot projects with the same intention, but they have inexplicably failed to scale it up. Can you put paper, tins, glass and plastic in the green bag? Is it collected by a truck? By the same truck that collects the black bag? Do you pay anything for the green bag?
May 9th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Green bags are free from Municipal offices and you put them out with the black bag. The truck has a trailer and they’re thrown in. You put tins, bottles, paper, plastic in the same bag. Rejoice employs people who sort. There’s a list of what you can and can’t put in. I just bumped into Rejoice and he tells me that he will have a compactor in operation next week. Currently he bales by hand. Glass goes into a skip; it has to be broken and he’s paid around R2300 a tonne, I believe. He also takes discarded fridges, washing machines, etc. and fixes and resells them.
Garbage is another story. Most authorities in this part of the world send it to Mossel Bay for processing. It used to go by rail before the line was washed away, but now it goes by road, which I fid slightly uncomfortable. I’d like to see a methane collection operation started, but there may be problems with economies of scale,I suspect. On the subject of garbage, look for a Canadian film called “Garbage: The Revolution Starts at Home”. Go to http://www.garbagerevolution.com for more details.
I think what’s missing is political will to make these sorts of initiative successful. I believe that small initiatives within fairly rigidly enforced broad guidelines are most likely to succeed. This applies to electricity generation too, I suspect. in a country which has 2000m of relief, there have to be opportunities for small scale hydro electricity. What about the large numbers of kilowatts that get thrown away when water from the Orange River is transferred to the Fish River in the Eastern Cape, for instance? May not be practical, but I haven’t seen anyone say that they’ve checked.