Local Government, Environmental Affairs and Development Planning
[1] Whether all the legal landfill sites in the province comply with his Department’s requirements; if not; (a) why not and (b) what steps are being taken to ensure compliance; if so;
[2] whether all the sites have (a) a clear notice board, (b) well-managed access control, (c) a weigh bridge, (d) a waste compaction area, (e) a leachate control dam, (f) a drainage system; (g) dust suppression systems and (h) gas monitoring probes; if not, why not;
[3] whether compliance with the requirements are being monitored; if not, why not; if so, what are the relevant details?
[1] Not all the waste disposal facilities comply with all the conditions of environmental authorisations.
[a] This can be attributed to various reasons such as poor planning, limited resources (both human and financial), limited technical competence, high cost of compliance due to very strict norms and standards adopted by the national Department of Environmental Affairs in 2013 and poor management of the facility.
[b] The Department is addressing the compliance challenges through capacity building, training, providing technical assistance, improving the quality of the audits (synchronising internal, external and authority’s audits), prioritising the audits to sites where more attention is needed and applying stronger law enforcement action where needed.
[2] (a) Most of the waste facilities have notice boards.
(b) Most of the bigger urban waste disposal facilities have good access control, which is not the case with smaller rural facilities.
[c] Of the 164 waste disposal facilities in the province only seven have weigh bridges and nine have mobile weigh pads. It is not a legal requirement at this stage that a waste disposal facility should have a weigh bridge or a weigh pad. Facility owners are however required to quantify and report on waste volumes disposed of. This is done at facilities without weigh bridges by utilising the waste calculator tool which the Department has developed.
[d] Compaction is taking place at the majority of the waste disposal facilities. The size of the landfill determines the type of compaction equipment needed.
[e] Leachate control dams are not a general requirement for all waste disposal facilities, only certain classes of waste disposal facilities must have these dams. Most of the facilities which have this as a requirement in its environmental authorisations, do comply with the requirement.
[f] Most of the waste disposal facilities do have basic drainage systems in place.
[g] Dust suppression is carried out at facilities where it is applicable or needed. At most the of the smaller facilities dust suppression is not necessary and therefore not an environmental authorisation condition.
[h] Only the bigger waste disposal facilities within the metro have gas monitoring probes in place as these facilities have the potential to produce more landfill gas than the smaller facilities. The Department, however does landfill gas surveys at waste disposal facilities, as a service to municipalities to monitor landfill gas levels. In general, the landfill gas levels are fairly low. Landfill gas monitoring is a requirement only at the bigger waste disposal facilities.
[3] The Department has conducted compliance audits at 80 waste facilities during the 2014/15 financial year. The initial audit protocol utilised made comparison of audit results and prioritisation interventions difficult. Compliance auditing has been dramatically improved with the introduction of a three colour performance rating system (non-compliant = red with compliance % between 0 and 64; partial compliant = amber with compliance % of between 65 and 84 and compliant = green with compliance % between 85 and 100).
