Kirk Semple, a professor of environmental microbiology at Lancaster University, was in South Africa recently sharing ideas on how waste and water can be components of the circular economy.



IN AN UNPRETENTIOUS SUIT, TIE and glasses, Kirk Semple looks every bit the academic he is.



Flying in to South Africa from a visit to Ghana for the first time, to speak at the annual Future Of Education Summit, organized by the ABN Group on December 4, this professor of environmental microbiology at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom is part of the institution’s Recirculate project, exploring different ways in which waste water can sustain communities.



“My original love is to do with how we can use microorganisms to deal with pollution in the environment, particularly from hydrocarbons in the soil,” he says.



Born and bred in Scotland, he is the Director of International Engagement at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Associate Dean International of the Faculty of Science and Technology and Interim Director of the Future Cities Research Institute at the university.



Seated in FORBES AFRICA’s offices in Sandton, Johannesburg, Semple takes us to the complex and captivating world of microorganisms.



“They still pose that metabolic versatility to degrade or decompose [waste] and we have been using them for hundreds and thousands of years,” he says.



As part of the Recirculate project, the key focus is to protect humans from contaminated water and disease using a sustainable water treatment system.



“As a population, we produce a lot of waste so it’s about taking that waste and using it to produce energy, the so-called bio-energy. And bio-energy is a sustainable off-grid system where you can convert bio gas, which is the product of this process and is combustible, into energy, whether heat or whatever.



“What we have discovered is that waste is actually nutritionally rich. But we are not alone in this. We have been looking at ways in which we can take that waste and use it instead of inorganic fertilizers in crop production.”



This, in turn, would offer an opportunity for farmers to possess sustainable and affordable solutions to grow crops. Semple says there are huge opportunities for this project in countries like South Africa.



Together with researchers from Stellenbosch University and the University of KwaZulu-Natal in the country, he has submitted several grants for the “waste-energy-food nexus”.



Water from toilets and taps end up at a water treatment plant and a big part of this nexus is to use microbial activity to decompose this waste into cleaner water.



“I’ve always been an optimist and I see lots of opportunity to work together and fortunately, at the moment, there’s a lot of funding opportunities, whether it is from government, business, the World Development Bank, the African Development Bank or charities,” he says.



They have since received £78 million ($101 million) from the Global Challenges Research Fund, to support the Recirculate project to develop a safe circular water economy.



Semple insists collaboration is key to solving some of the world’s biggest problems.



“What is really good is how people from different African countries are trying to work together to make life better and that for me is really important given what is going on in the world politically, and given what is going on in the world in terms of the environment.”



Looking back at his journey at Lancaster University, Semple did not always see himself in the world of academia. After working at a research institute as a post-doctoral researcher in 1995, he wanted to figure out what he really wanted to do.



“I was still adamant I didn’t want to be an academic,” he says. He chanced upon a vacancy for a position at Lancaster University which was in his area of interest. However, he dismissed the thought. A couple of weeks later, he saw the same post again, but did not pursue it. The third time he saw it, destiny had its way. Semple applied for the job and the rest is history.



His fulfilling assignment in West Africa has allowed him to collaborate with more researchers across the continent and teach post-graduation students, creating better solutions for the planet’s water crises.

recyclable waste,broken bottles, many broken glass bottles from waste separation factories for recycling.

‘Waste Is Rich’

Richard Hardiman is using drones to rid the world’s seas of trash. He faced bankruptcy and depression before the project went from prototype to profit.

Rubbish in the world’s oceans has reached critical levels that threaten not only marine life but also our own future on this planet as we know it, as fragile eco-systems are eroded.
What is already out on the seas, estimated by National Geographic to be growing by almost a million tonnes per year, is lost, but South African entrepreneur Richard Hardiman has developed a drone to catch this waste at source – the harbors and ports of the world – before it hits the ocean.rubbish in the world’s oceans has reached critical levels that threaten not only marine life but also our own future on this planet as we know it, as fragile eco-systems are eroded.
The WasteShark has been in planning and product testing stages since 2015, but is now sold globally as a drone that can clear the water of waste and help halt what is a growing catastrophe on our seas.
It has been a long personal battle for Cape Town-based Hardiman, one that brought him to the edge of despair.
But with the product in the water in a growing number of countries, including South Africa, the United States, India, the United Arab Emirates, Netherlands, Germany and Sweden, his Rotterdam-based company RanMarine Technology is primed to be a leader in this niche field.
“The initial idea was not motivated by trying to solve environmental problems,” Hardiman tells FORBES AFRICA. “I was sitting at the Waterfont in Cape Town watching these guys out in boats with pool nets pulling the plastic from the water.
<blockquote>“It irritated me that there was a lot of trash and they were trying to solve the problem with a little net. In was inefficient and you could see trash being swept out into the open ocean.”</blockquote>
Hardiman, who worked as a radio host for much of his adult life, developed the idea for a drone that could mechanize the process, either controlled from the shore or on its own as a robot in the water.
“I built a prototype, literally in my garage, by sticking some PVC pipes together and did some research on the internet,” he says.
“I taught myself how to code on to my phone and came up with a small drone I put into my pool and started to drive around. It did what it was supposed to do.”
Hardiman had no luck finding early investors in South Africa though.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2015/12/01/diving-ocean-cash/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Diving Into An Ocean Of Cash</a>
“The feedback was quite good, but if I’m honest my pitch was terrible,” he says. “In trying to raise money, the one thing I have learned is that your pitch needs to be perfect. If you cannot be precise with every answer to every conceivable question, it turns investors off.
“Although people love the environment, let’s face it, if they are putting money into it they want to see a return on investment.”
The ingenuity of the idea caught the attention of Accelerator though, a program to help start-ups based in Rotterdam. Hardiman began in the top 1,000 entries from around the world, eventually making it to the final 20 after an arduous series of interviews.
<div id="attachment_37257" style="width: 750px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-37257" class="wp-image-37257 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="740" height="494" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-Copy-of-ranmarine-4690.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 740px) 100vw, 740px" />WasteShark is becoming a feature of a number of ports and harbors.</div>
He was then required to make the journey to the Netherlands for the finals and by this time had sunk so much energy, time and money into the project that the married father-of-three had nothing left to fund the trip.
“I was completely broke, I had no money left. I was taking any job I could get. I was penniless,” he admits.
Hardiman eventually found a local investor who took a punt on the project and lent him the money to get himself to the Accelerator finals.
“He gave me enough money to pay for the trip and to survive for about six months. But when I landed in Rotterdam, his cheque hadn’t cleared yet, my credit card had zero funds in it and I had five Euros in my pocket.
“Each day for a week I would walk from my hotel to the [Accelerator] event, which was about five kilometers away, sometimes in the rain and snow.
“Everybody else was so well-dressed and I would arrive in a soaking wet suit.”
But the response to WasteShark was overwhelming and he made it into the Accelerator program, which meant leaving his Cape Town-based family behind to live in Rotterdam for the next three months.
“After the three months we had done really well and we got a pilot with the Port of Rotterdam, which is the largest port in the world. They put 100,000 Euros into what would be a six-month project.”
But there would be more hurdles for Hardiman to face and the worst was yet to come.
“I fell out with the original engineering firm and brought on another partner that proved to be a disaster. It just wasn’t the right fit. By the end of 2016, I was completely out of money again and we were only halfway through development.
“I came back to South Africa licking my wounds. We had spent a lot of money and it had not really gone anywhere. In terms of investors, I found that the Dutch love innovation, but they hate risk, so nobody wanted to come into the project early.
“I went into a deep spiral of depression. I’d gone from having money to no money again. I had half a product that I needed to make work because I had a family to support.
“But I found I just couldn’t get out of bed, I really felt like I had screwed up and let everybody down.”
A chance meeting at a children’s party led to Hardiman finding a local South African investor who liked the idea of the project and could see the potential. He returned to the Netherlands.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-37258 alignright" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-300x225.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-600x450.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Copy-of-IMG_2188.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />
“I just needed enough money to get through to June 2017 because by then we would have finished the product development stage. Then we could start selling.”
A little more than a year on and WasteShark is becoming a feature of a number of ports and harbors, and Hardiman has now moved on to the next stage.
“We sold one, then another, and suddenly it just started taking off,” he says. “We have been inundated with interest from all around the world. It’s a new position for us to be in, from the phase of trying to get a finished product out to going into production.”
Hardiman says that while they could have gotten carried away with technology on the WasteShark, the aim was actually to make the drone as simple as possible.
<blockquote>“I had this vision of a guy on Lake Malawi using our drone and when I sat down with the group of engineers to plan the product, there were many fantastic ideas about what we could do.</blockquote>
“But I was firm in my mind that we need to cater for that guy in Malawi. If a thruster is broken, he can fix it himself. It must be easy for him to operate, be simple and robust.”
Hardiman says they have numerous other versions of the WasteShark in planning and production including one that provides data on the quality of the water and another that can clean up oil in harbors. The next version will be ready September.
He adds he is most often asked what he hopes to do about the critical issue of plastic in the oceans, but the realistic goal for now is to stop the problem getting worse.
“My goal is not to solve the issue that is already out there, because that’s not realistic. It’s to stop the problem getting worse.
“If we can do that in a canal, river, marina or harbor, where most of the trash in the sea comes from, then you are starting to win the battle.”
&#8211; Nick Said

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The Man Who Sunk His Finances To Clean The Ocean

Makafui Awuku has slept on a bench, hunted in the bush, worked at a church and sifted through mountains of plastic waste. He is the man turning trash into cash in Ghana.

Thirtyfive-year-old Makafui Awuku has been through enough pain and penury in life to see beauty in the little things. He is the man who can turn plastic scrap to nifty objects of desire.
His is a life filled with odd, interesting assignments.
It is easy to see why Awuku is not particularly fond of his early years. The social entrepreneur and founder of Mckingtorch Creatives did not have a privileged life.
Born in Keta, Sogakope, in the Volta Region of Ghana, his father, who was a driver, passed away when he was aged 12 leaving Awuku, his sister and mother to fend for themselves. Surviving on his mother’s income as a nurse was not enough for Makafui to achieve his dream of becoming a doctor. Instead, he had to depend on his wits for survival.
He would hunt with a catapult in the bush and even started his own poultry farm to generate extra income. Then in 2005, life became grimmer.
His mother passed away from a stroke and Awuku found himself stranded with no help.
Armed with just $1,000 from his mother’s pension contribution, he moved to Ghana’s capital city, Accra, in search of greener pastures.

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<blockquote>&#8220;There was a lot of waste generated during board meetings,&#8221;</blockquote>
That same year, he got admission to study marketing at the Institute of Professional Services but the money he made was not enough to pay tuition fees.
“I have struggled most of my way through life. I have slept on a bench in Accra and I have also slept at a 24-hour internet café. I didn’t have anywhere to sleep, so I decided to just spend the night behind the computer there. While in school, I had to find part-time work to pay my fees and pay my medical bills as I had asthma,” says Awuku.
He would do assignments for his colleagues and charge them for it, and also pick up odd jobs such as being a part-time soccer teacher for an international school in Accra. But he eventually had to drop out of school because he couldn’t afford it.
“I eventually met one of my mentors and supporters, Reverend Richard C. Whitcomb, a senior overseer of the Agape House New Testament Church in East Legon. He gave me a job at the church, then he helped pay my rent and then when I had to go back after I deferred my final year, he helped pay my tuition fees too.”
Awuku published his first book in 2015, The Tertiary Years, to address inefficiencies in the education system in Ghana and help young students build leadership skills.
That was followed by his social project called Student Initiative Ghana, a platform for the personal development and training of young people.
“I have visited over 15 schools and trained over 80,000 people over the last 15 years in the areas of brain-training and memory enhancement and helped young people with learning difficulties.”
He subsequently gained admission to the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) program created by former American President Barack Obama in his early years at the White House to develop the leadership of young people in Africa creating value in their communities.
“I spent five weeks in Nigeria at the Administrative Staff College in Badagry. I returned to Ghana to do an internship program. I worked with the One Ghana Movement and one of the programs they were doing was on sanitation. The team was going to be buying 1,000 bins and installing it in various places in Accra in partnership with the Accra Metropolitan Assembly,” says Awuku.
This is when he found his Eureka moment.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2018/04/18/roll-used-tyres/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: On A Roll With Used Tyres</a>
“While I was doing the internship, I realized there was a lot of waste generated during board meetings. I decided I wanted to do something about this. I looked through the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and I looked at the plastic waste problem. I said to myself, ‘I took a course on waste management at university and I am a fan of clean environment, so let me do something with sustainable communities and cities which the plastic waste falls under’,” avers Awuku.
A 2002 report by the African Development Bank said that Ghana generated about 3.6 million tonnes of solid waste per year made up predominantly of food, plastic and wood. Awuku decided to join the fight to clean up Accra’s streets. He started Mckingtorch Creatives in January 2018 to turn plastic waste into art.
“So I started collecting bottles from the office and decided to try designing a Christmas tree from plastic waste. I got a welder to install a frame for me that looked like a frame for a tree and I decided to buy ropes. I would drill holes under the bottles and on top of the bottles and pass the ropes through them and install them on the tree. A day before Christmas, I had finished the tree. I bought lights and put them up and there were actually 396 plastic bottles on that tree,” says Awuku.
He installed his new creation in a major street in Madina, a suburb in Accra.
“I realized that it was changing people’s attitudes, they were shocked that plastic waste and bottles could be used in this manner. So I decided that I could take things a lot further and look at modeling some solutions I could develop using plastic waste,” says Awuku.
Some of his creations include flower pots, bins, wall-hangings and even sandals.
He also teamed up with one of the biggest manufacturers of bottled water in Ghana to create a fence with over 10,000 bottles for World Environment Day.
Awuku is determined to tell the youth that there can be workable solutions for waste and that they can be a pertinent part of building a planet free of plastic.

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Ghana’s Wastepreneur

It doesn&#8217;t look like much but it&#8217;s the first of its kind on African soil that could turn a stinking problem into a profit. This $400-million plant takes the black rubbish bags of Cape Town, with their rotting food and heaven knows what else, and converts it into gas – methane and carbon dioxide – for sale.
The plant, owned by New Horizons Energy, a subsidiary of Clean Energy Africa, is the fruit of five years of planning with family-owned Waste-Mart, one of the largest waste collectors in the city. It was also backed by African Oxygen (Afrox) and the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC).
This machine was born of a shortage of holes in which to put rubbish in Cape Town.
&#8220;WasteMart brings in 500 tons of waste a day. Cape Town produces 2 million tons a year. It goes to landfills sites and sits useless. We plan to convert 10 percent of Cape Town&#8217;s waste into something. The city of Cape Town, in effect, has become our mine,&#8221; says New Horizons Energy CEO, Egmont Ottermann.
<div id="attachment_4621" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-4621" class="size-medium wp-image-4621" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/biowaste-plant_JC-2-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Preparation of apricot juice for the plant.</div>
It is a 15-year dream Ottermann has realized. He says he first came up with the idea when looking at how to make gas that is produced in the cement industry.
At the heart of this are millions upon millions of bugs that live inside the huge vats and eat the rubbish to produce the methane. In their teething days they were fed nothing but cow manure before moving on to 50 tons of apricot juice. The bugs will mature in May and be strong enough to chomp their way through waste, turning it into valuable gas.
“We’re very excited about the plant. It can help to replace imported fuels by taking the waste and making gas out of the resource. Most importantly, it’s creating jobs. We also believe that there is massive opportunity for replication throughout South Africa and Africa,” says Raoul Goosen, the IDC’s Green Industry Specialist, who played a vital part in securing a 60% finance backing for the project.
The plant will release 20 tons of carbon dioxide and 540 gigajoules of biomethane, which Afrox will buy.
“For Afrox it&#8217;s a sustainable green offering that our customers are looking for. It&#8217;s a good news story from birth to graveyard in terms of managing a waste stream,” says Silvia Schollenberger, Afrox Head of Commercial and Projects.
&#8220;We found there was more value to the industries of biogas, rather than energy. Cape Town has grown tremendously over the past 10 years. Afrox has seen shortages of carbon dioxide and methane, especially in summer, so this is a good idea on various levels,” says Ottermann.
Ottermann believes there’s more rubbish than time.
&#8220;It&#8217;s not the silver bullet solution, but it&#8217;s a start. The idea is to use 100 percent of the landfill. We’re enhancing the recycling economy. There’s great potential in the future to make products such as plastic bricks and roof tiles. Over the lifetime of this plant, we expect many more little industries to be established close to the plant, so that we can drive zero waste to landfill.”
Where there&#8217;s muck there&#8217;s brass – there is also gas.

Rubbish. Bugs.  Profit.

<h3>Thato Kgatlhanye, 23</h3>
<h3>CEO, Rethaka</h3>
One day, when you wake up to a rubbish bin that tells you when it&#8217;s full and needs to be emptied, it will probably have been designed by Thato Kgatlhanye, CEO of Rethaka. This is her wish. Her company already produces recycled schoolbags that double as solar-powered lights children can use to study in the evening.
From Mogwase, a small town 40 minutes outside Rustenburg in the North West province, she’s in the process of creating a business empire out of waste.
She founded Rethaka at the age of 18. It now employs 20 people, with nine volunteers, and supplies its products to the likes of Standard Bank, Red Bull, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Unilever. The company exports to Namibia, Turkey, the UK and Brazil. The aim is to expand to 24 African countries.
“Our company is set up to be a leader in Africa, in the transition towards a circular economy, where we look at waste as a resource and use it to remanufacture products. At Rethaka, we say we’re resourcing Africa’s future,” says Kgatlhanye.
Her mother is a nurse who managed clinics in their district. Her father is a taxi owner and driver.
“The quiet tension between their careers built something in me way before I knew who Thato would be,” she says.
“Yes, I am an entrepreneur like my father, but I also have a social conscience and that can be attributed to my mother. I’m not just in business for profit; I’m in business to do good.”
Kgatlhanye’s parents had to deal with her independent mind at a very young age when she chose all the schools she attended from grade four onwards.
After graduating from the Vega School of Brand Leadership, Kgatlhanye was offered an internship in New York with marketing guru Seth Godin.
“This changed my life. It gave me a perspective of what was possible. I think being in a city like New York, you start thinking of yourself being capable of doing anything. All you have to do is make a decision on what is it you’d like to do, and kill it,” she says.
Kgatlhanye is killing it. She has won several awards, from the Samsung Student Excellence Award in 2014, third place in the SAB Foundation Social Innovation Award, to finalist of the Cartier Women’s Initiative Award in 2015.
With this bright young mind, anything is possible. Get ready to listen to your rubbish bin.
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CEO, Rethaka

When most of us think about rubbish, we imagine dirt and all kinds of nasty diseases. But for South African businesswoman Lilly-Girl
Dukada-Hentcho, waste is a treasure.
She has been in the waste management business in the country for nearly three years, and is now looking at expanding not only across South Africa, but also elsewhere on the continent.
“The environment is my passion and waste is gold. Success is not only about money; it’s also about changing the mindset of people about waste and recycling,” she explains.
Dukada-Hentcho is part of a group of women entrepreneurs who are stepping up to the plate in the waste management sector. It is an industry that is growing rapidly in South Africa and other parts of the world, as people become more enlightened about conserving the environment , and consumerism continues to spread.
“As we know, the whole world is encouraging Africa to take a big step in saving the environment. The old waste collection mandates have changed now from just collecting waste and dumping.”
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Dukada-Hentcho, along with her husband, Philippe, formed DNH Recycling and Waste Management Services in Midrand in Gauteng three years ago. The company focuses on separating waste at source.
Although she had had some experience in running a waste management company in the United Kingdom, when she started her venture  in South Africa, Dukada-Hentcho says the sector was virtually a no-woman’s land.
To add to her woes, recycling did not happen on a large scale in the country, with many considering it a trendy suburbia practice.
“It was like entering the lion’s den. We had to offer free pilot [projects] for them to see what they were buying,” she says.
But since then, the picture has changed. Dukada-Hentcho credits her strong belief system and willingness to take risks for the success of her company, which also does waste analysis for clients, including Famous Brands, at
38 sites.
In its first year, DNH brought in $100,000. The following year that had increased to more than $240,000. This year, she plans to double her revenue again. The company is looking at ventures in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria, and is also in meetings with the University of Johannesburg with a view to collaborating on a waste energy project.
Dukada-Hentcho is just one example of a number of South Africans cottoning on to the fact that waste has value.
In May, Johannesburg, South Africa’s economic hub, held its first waste management summit, and Mayor Parks Tau challenged delegates to view rubbish in a different light. On average, South Africans each produce about one kilogram of waste a day, and if Johannesburg does not start diverting waste on a much bigger scale, none of the current landfill space will be around in 10 years’ time.
According to a baseline study conducted by the government, the country generated 108 million tons of waste in 2011. Ninety-eight million was disposed of in landfills, and only 10% was recycled through various forms, such as separation at source, composting and buy-back centres.
The latest statistics, from 2009, estimate South Africa’s waste sector to be worth $1 billion. Government, which has earmarked the green economy – waste in particular – as a priority area to build the economy, believes the sector can grow from its current 0.56% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), to 1-2% of GDP. In Europe, the eco-industry is showing growth rates of 7-8% per annum.
The concept of a green economy is emerging much faster in South Africa compared to the rest of the continent. In fact, it is one of the most important elements in the country’s new growth plan; the creation of a lower-carbon economy is being punted as a major source of jobs.
South Africa’s Industrial Development Corporation, a development finance institution, has earmarked $2.5 billion over five years to 2015/16 for the development of green industries. In partnership with German development bank, KfW, the IDC has also allocated $50 million to a Green Energy Efficiency Fund. It is aimed at stimulating investments by local entrepreneurs. One of the projects already in progress generates biogas from abattoir waste. Funding options for waste management and recycling technologies are also being developed.
“Innovation is considered crucial in growing and sustaining the waste industry. We need new and better ways of doing things,” Henry Roman, from the national Science and Technology Department, told delegates at the waste summit.
Traditionally the sector, which the United Nations Environment Program values at $437 billion a year worldwide, has been epitomized by a large participation of women at the bottom end. There are about 15 million waste pickers in developing countries and they largely consist of women and children.
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However, in South Africa, the face of the sector is changing, and women are increasingly becoming key players. They include the president of the Institute of Waste Management of Southern Africa, Suzan Oelofse; the CEO of PET Plastic Recycling Company (Petco), Cheri Scholtz; the operations director of the Paper Recycling Association of South Africa, Ursula Henneberry; and EnviroServ group property and marketing director Delia Lavarinhas.
Oelofse says researchers in the waste sector at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and at universities are mostly women.
“Women care more. We realize more what the impact is of bad management, and also we care more about the aesthetics of waste,” she explains.
At household level, Oelofse believes there will be an increased focus on recycling and waste separation across the country as South Africans become more aware about preserving the environment.  Also, she says there are a number of growth areas in the waste management sector that women can tap into.
These include extracting usable resour-ces from industrial waste, separating waste at source and waste-to-energy projects, such as developing landfill sites for the harvesting of methane gas as an alternative energy source.
There are also opportunities for women in the post-consumer recycling of water and soft drinks bottles that contain polyethylene terephthalate (PET).
Under Scholtz’s stewardship, PET recycling has almost doubled in tonnage over four years. Close to $19.3 million was paid for sorted, baled bottles delivered to recyclers, and approximately $42 million was injected into the local economy through the sale of recycled PET for downstream products.
“There is still much work to do to capture the remaining percentage of bottles that were not collected, and with the post-consumer PET recycling targets set to rise to 58% in 2017, with a growing market size, increasing the volume of bottles collected for recycling is thought to be the best method of achieving this,” explains Scholtz.
“There is a need for more visible, accessible infrastructure in the form of drop-off facilities, buy-back centres and materials-recovery facilities. This is enabled by increased investment in the recycling sector, making it a bankable sector.”
Also, Scholtz says there is a need for constant innovation in the field of design, to ensure that the bottles produced are actually recyclable, and that labeling is improved so that consumers are encouraged to recycle them and they do not end up in landfills.
Another growing area of opportunity is South Africa’s development of a sustainable tires recycling industry. According to the Recycling and Economic Development Initiative of South Africa, a waste management fee on new tires is expected to generate around $70 million per year. Eighty percent of it will be ploughed directly into developing the industry.
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While the outlook for the sector is bullish, women still face an uphill battle if they want to make their mark.
Aliena Ratenazi, an entrepreneur who has been researching the waste management industry for four years, and who is getting into the business herself, says that women are often the worker bees who compete at the lower-level structures.
“The barrier of entry in the waste sector comes with a heavy price tag for women… Today, a lot of women contribute to the household and need to make their businesses a success, which within this sector is not an easy task,” says Ratenazi.
“South Africa as a country is not giving the support in the field of educating, funding and training women to enter the waste sector, as we have no role models in this sector&#8230; [It] can be a huge green industry that can focus on major transformation with the optimization of women in waste, where the benefits are considerable and tangible. [This], in turn, would mean huge growth for South Africa, as there is an abundance of waste available in our landfills,” she says.
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As South Africa shifts focus to industrializing the country in a sustainable way, the managing of waste will become more of a priority. The time is ripe for women to investigate the different technologies out there, which will have a seismic impact on how the industry operates, and ultimately, how much money can be made

Tag: Waste

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