Local Government, Environ-mental Affairs and Development Planning
With regard to municipal landfills declared non-compliant by the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment as reported by a Cape Times article on 16 February 2022:
(a) How many municipalities were declared non-compliant, (b) what are the constraints preventing them from being compliant and (c) what assistance does his Department give to the municipalities deemed to be non-compliant
(a) The Cape Times article was based on a presentation presented by DFFE on waste statistics for the period 2017 / 2018 and the first quarter of 2020/21, and excluded 2018/19 and 2019/20 financial year information from the statistics. The presentation reflected the number of facilities that were non, partially and fully compliant, and not necessarily the number of municipalities that meet compliance standards. 16 out of the 30 municipalities in the Western Cape are non-compliant from the audits conducted in the 2021/22 financial year.
(b) Municipalities are challenged with inadequate funding allocated to operations at waste disposal facilities. The challenges with the COVID-19 pandemic have required the reallocation of funds planned for waste management to alleviate the impacts of the pandemic. The waste disposal facilities are audited against their respective Waste Management Licence conditions, and typical non-compliances would include lack of fencing, fires on site, lack of conducting internal and external audits, lack of ground water monitoring, lack of access control, amongst others.
(c) The Department takes a cooperative governance and an administrative approach, by auditing the waste disposal facilities, which allows the municipality to have an evaluation of the status of their waste facilities. Feedback is then provided to the municipalities by the Department on the findings, and municipalities are then required to inform this department what their plan of action is to remedy the lack of compliance and resources to be employed, within specified timeframes.
In addition to the Departmental audits, municipalities are also required to have internal (quarterly) and external (annual) audits conducted on their waste management facilities in terms of their permit/waste management licences.
The Department provides assistance to the municipalities by means of training, awareness programs, developmental tools and exposure to best practices. This would be in the form of auditing protocols and applicable scoring criteria, landfill airspace management and alternative waste management technologies, and capacity building on waste minimization and information waste management initiatives, in order to capacitate municipalities in applying waste management best practices.
Failure by municipalities to submit their action plans for rectification of non-complaint conditions, will result in them being handed over to the Environmental Law Enforcement Unit for further action.
