“The waste pickers shouldn’t be working under these conditions,” an AfriForum team from Pretoria said when they saw the reclaimers at the Vondeling waste-management site of Makhado (Louis Trichardt).

This municipal landfill site has been an on-going source of irritation and a health risk for residents who use it to dump their waste or who stay in the vicinity, battling to survive amid the flies, the odour, unsightly litter, dust and smoke.

For the reclaimers who work at the dumping site, the health and even safety risks are magnified. Women with children were spotted in the area before the control gate. In the area inside the control gate, reclaimers were sorting waste. They were not wearing adequate protective clothing and waded knee deep into the refuse.  

“We do reclaiming for a company,” one of the women said to Dr Ben van der Waal, executive member of the local AfriForum branch during the AfriForum inspection visit at the end of February. They sort the waste into bags to get them ready to be transported and sold to recycling companies.

“Recycling must be done at the beginning and on a cleared area. An area must be cleared next to the fence inside the control gate or even before the control gate. The recycling has to be done before the waste is dumped on the site,” said Mr Julius Kleynhans, AfriForum's head of environmental affairs. Kleynhans said that the new regulations for a waste management plan put much more emphasis on recycling. The recycling at the Vondeling dumping site is done amid the heaps of waste.

An estimated 88 000 people nationwide earn their living by picking waste. Waste pickers and their associates can also become entrepreneurs as was seen at the Vondeling site where an entrepreneur had put up the odd spaza shop.

The sight of children at the landfill site visibly upset Mr Tiaan Esterhuizen, AfriForum's Limpopo organiser. “Recycling must be done according to health regulations,” Esterhuizen said. Waste reclaimers are exposed to waste on a regular basis and therefore a greater health risk. The network organising reclaimers in the Tshwane municipal area states in its own regulations that they will, among others, “not drink and gamble at landfill sites” nor “bring children to landfill sites.” 

The safety risks that waste reclaimers are exposed to include being run over by heavy machinery since they are sometimes so covered in waste that they are not easily seen.

Van der Waal saw a container of putrefied chicken meat lying around. The minimum requirements for landfill operations prescribe the immediate covering of putrescibles, according to the South African Waste Information Centre (Sawic).

Other minimum requirements pertaining to all sizes of landfill sites include a waste-acceptance procedure, sufficient qualified staff, compaction of waste, daily cover of waste, two week’s cell of trench capacity, three days stockpile of cover, final cover, protection of unsafe excavations, draining water away from the waste, adequate plant and equipment, a formal reclaiming operation plan, protection of reclaimers and protective clothing.