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| Turning slurry into lawn at Duzi Grass in KwaZulu-Natal. |
My life partner and I have different views on recycling. I get warm fuzzies from sorting glass, tin, paper and cartons into tottering stacks for removal at some later date.
She calls this process “hoarding trash” and just bags it all for the weekly rubbish collection.
She tells me her way helps to feed indigent families who work as pickers at the municipal dump. And she is, as usual, right. Every dump in South Africa has its army of pickers and it is a marvel to watch how fast they sift the tons of trash spilling from a dump truck. Anything that can be sold — metal, bottles, aluminium cans and cartons — quickly go into jealously guarded heaps and from there to recycling depots.
Keegan Moodley runs one such depot, KVM Recyclers, an NGO that he started in 2012 in the family’s engineering shop in Pietermaritzburg. Moodley is a passionate recycler who makes weekly visits to the dump in a small, one-ton truck, where the NGO on average pays a picker R300 to R400 a month. Moodley said the next plan is to get a bigger truck with a crane to lift the big bags of glass, which will allow him to speed up both the collections and the pickers’ cash flow. “We make your waste a valuable resource to save our planet,” he said.
So next time you feel guilty about not recycling, don’t. In a country where four in 10 people don’t have jobs, one person’s trash is another person’s income.
It is not just our rubbish that helps to circulate a few rands. Our flushings too, are doing their bit in the Msunduzi economy, where Darvel Water Works turns the contents of every flushed loo in KZN’s capital into lush lawns.
These lawns are cultivated and harvested by Duzi Turf, which plants L.M. grass, Berea, Kikuyu, Cynodon and Royal Blue on road verges, bowling greens and sports fields. Hence your loo water becomes instant lawn throughout KZN and down to the Eastern Cape, where the grass helps separate carbon from oxygen while contributing greatly to cooler suburbs and less erosion.
At another water works, this one in Isipingo, an even more pioneering recycling concept is being proven by BioCycle, a company that is turning human sludge into livestock feed using the wondrous digestion of the black soldier fly (BSF) larvae. BSF is a shy fly that eschews humans, but its larvae chew anything that rots, ranging from kitchen waste to pig manure. One statistic states one square metre of soldier fly larvae can convert about 15 kilograms of waste into five percent calcium and 42% protein per day, making the dried and processed larvae an ideal ingredient for fish, poultry and pig feed.
eThekwini Water and Sanitation (EWS) made the Isipingo site available for BioCycle’s fly larvae tests and mechanical engineer Nelson Machete is “lord of the flies”. Machete designed the plant and states the project shows larvae turn human faecal sludge into livestock feed with no pathogens carried through. Supported by a grant via the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, BioCycle aims next to franchise the micro-business to profit from poo by creating high-value larval products, including animal feed and biodiesel, while increasing community sanitation. This is not just corporate speak. BioCycle is a subsidiary of AgriProtein, an international award-winning company that has, since starting in Phillipi in the Western Cape in 2009, grown into the world’s biggest fly farmer.
AgriProtein sends BSF eggs from Phillipi to Isipingo, which is a distance or over 1 500 km and a surprisingly delicate process, and has licensed its fly factories in seven countries. The aim is to build a network of 200 “insect protein factories” around the world by 2027. It has to date allocated licences in the U.S., Asia, Australasia and the Middle East, and in February partnered Austrian engineers Christof Industries to roll out its fly factories on a turnkey basis anywhere in the world at the rate of 25 per year.
The recycling initiatives by grass-roots entrepreneurs like Moodley, local businesses like Duzi Turf and internationally connected companies like BioCycle and AgriProtein are just four of many other projects in SA that show there’s money in recycling.
But we still need to make a plan with all our plastics. So here are two thoughts that I hope will inspire all extruders and moulders of plastic packaging: hemp oil makes a non-toxic biodegradable plastic and millions of greenies are willing to pay a premium for packaging that will break down without adding more carcinogens to our soils or water.
Your move, big business.
• People who want to recycle glass and cans in Msunduzi can contact KVM Recyclers at kvmengineering@telkomsa.net
