Q&A: South Africa’s Recycling Challenge: Progress, Pitfalls and Potential

This week is Clean-Up & Recycle Week, an annual national initiative spearheaded by Plastics SA and the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment. 

Petco, South Africa’s longest-standing producer responsibility body, is marking the occasion with a call to action: it wants companies, communities and individuals to change the way they handle waste.

The organisation is working to keep valuable recyclable post-consumer packaging out of landfills and within the circular economy at its highest value. 

Cape Chamber spoke to Petco CEO, Telly Chauke:

As a prominent PRO, would you say businesses are doing enough to recycle their materials?

Some businesses, like those that are members of a compliant PRO such as Petco, are doing a lot to recover and recycle the materials they place on the market. However, there is always more that can be done. We are proud to report that in 2024, Petco delivered robust annual results for the collection and recycling of post-consumer packaging, meeting the legislated targets for 99% of the tonnage of identified products placed on the market by its members in 2024.

That means that Petco’s members are doing a lot by  providing the financial contributions needed to ensure that the packaging that they place on the market is collected and recycled in South Africa.

Unfortunately, there are many Producers (brand owners, retailers, and importers) in South Africa, who do not belong to PROs and are not implementing their own schemes, known as free riders, and so they are not doing enough to ensure that their packaging stays out of landfill and the environment, and circulating in the economy.

We also have a challenge with the design of packaging that ends up on shelves in South Africa that hasn’t been designed to be compatible with recycling infrastructure in SA. This means that even if this packaging gets to a recycling plant, it cannot be reprocessed, and often contaminates the stream of recyclable material, leading to costly losses for recyclers.

We’re seeing some commitment, but the scale of the problem means we need faster, broader action from industry across the board.

Since you came into existence more than 20 years ago, have you seen a big uptake in responsible behaviour? If so, what is driving this change?  Carrot or stick?

Over the past 20 years, Petco has seen a shift in how businesses and communities approach recycling and it’s been driven by a mix of incentives and regulation.

Beyond voluntary partnerships (the Petco model was voluntary until mandatory EPR came into effect at the end of 2021) and market-price support for recyclables (Petco works with its recycling partners to ensure that there is capacity and capability to reprocess recyclables,  thereby increasing the gate price (price that the recycler pays for recyclable materials) which in turn improves the earnings for the collection and recycling value chain.  We’ve invested in a wide range of initiatives to change behaviour.

These include unlocking liquid board and PET packaging collections by creating awareness of the value of liquid board packaging and its post recycled applications, supporting buy-back centres and raising on-the-ground prices, building capacity through accredited business training and awareness programmes for thousands of beneficiaries, implementing education and awareness initiatives and working closely with municipalities and government to improve collection infrastructure (and S@S programmes) and align on regulation.

During the voluntary period preceding implementation of the regulations, some of our brand owner members were primarily driven by their own internal sustainability goals and corporate social responsibility initiatives.  

These are the same members who remain committed to their responsibility as producers and ensuring that Extended Producer Responsibility is effectively implemented in South Africa.

With that being said  Petco is hoping to see more vigorous enforcement of Extended Producer Responsibility regulations, particularly when it comes to addressing free-riders who put packaging onto the market but do not contribute towards its collection and recycling.

Petco also seeks to see a stronger regulatory shift towards inhibiting the use of problematic packaging that is hard to recycle or compromises the efficiency of the recycling process of high value materials.  

Are you able to share any recent figures that show the quantity of recycled material vs what goes to landfill (or any other figures that might be of interest)

Is it fair to say that South Africa still has a LOT of work to do in terms of their waste challenge? My understanding is that we are battling a plastic waste tsunami and that our landfills are oversubscribed. What is the biggest obstacle?

Paper and Packing only make about 30% of the waste that ends up in landfills, with other materials such as organic waste and builders' rubble making up the rest. There has been significant work undertaken to develop the plastic value chain, making the package value so that instead of it ending up at the landfill, it finds itself at recyclers for processing.

Although we have come far and we do have well-established systems in place for the collection and recycling of some packaging, we still have a lot of work to do. We’re dealing with high volumes of packaging on the market, landfill capacity pressures, greenwashing (especially when it comes to biodegradable and compostable packaging), lack of consumer awareness/priority given to sustainability agenda and lack of or uneven collection and processing infrastructure across the country.

The biggest obstacle is not a single thing but a combination: insufficient infrastructure and collection coverage (especially for some packaging types), low levels of separation at source in many households, design challenges and the need to fully integrate and fairly remunerate the informal sector into formal value chains. Addressing funding, education and awareness, collaboration, design for recyclability and on-the-ground collection and recycling together is critical.

Presumably there is big job creation potential re recycling, both in the formal and informal sector?

Recycling already supports thousands of livelihoods in the informal and formal sector and we see strong potential for more formal jobs as collection networks, sorting facilities and recycling capacity expands.

Programmes that pay collectors and build local enterprise create measurable socio-economic benefit, that’s central to how we invest member funds. In 2024, Petco spent R70 million on financial support for the value chain, which enabled its contracted recycling partners to purchase approximately R470-million in post-consumer packaging materials from small businesses.

This creates monetary value in collecting materials, enabling the money to flow down the value chain to waste pickers. 

*Note that this is only related to the materials that we administer schemes for

Are we seeing more interest in events like Clean-ups and Re-cycle week?

Yes, engagement is growing. We’re seeing more community activations, corporate clean-ups and entries for the Petco Awards, and those events are useful for increasing awareness, changing behaviour, local mobilisation and linking people into the collection and recycling value chain.

As Petco, we have collaborated with our members, other NGOs, co-operatives, buy-back centres and various levels of government to conduct cleanups. Plastics SA who are the co-ordinating body have had so much more interest this year, with requests from organisations on how they can get involved too.