REDISA's Stacey Jansen claims the Recycling and Economic Development Initiative of South Africa (REDISA) was illegally shut down under the administration of former president Jacob Zuma.
South Africa generates more than 70,000 waste tyres a day and recycles less than 30% of them — a public health and environmental emergency playing out in real time. Set against that scale, the notion that a communications firm's submission of a critical opinion piece on my behalf to the Daily Maverick amounts to a political attack aimed at the removal of a minister is a fiction that serves only to distract from a crisis that is very real.
The tyres that are not recycled in South Africa largely accumulate on the urban fringe and around informal settlements, where they are burned for scrap metal, releasing carcinogens and heavy metals into the air that some of the country's poorest communities breathe, and leaching poisons into the groundwater. This is a public health and environmental emergency unfolding in slow motion, and it is barely discussed.
It should be, because it was once being solved. The Recycling and Economic Development Initiative of South Africa (REDISA) was built and funded by industry — through a producer-responsibility levy, not government money — to address precisely this problem. Between 2013 and 2017 it established a national collection and processing network, grew the number of tyre recyclers from 12 to 32, lifted the recycling rate from 4% to 55%, created more than 3,000 jobs and some 250 small businesses, and won international recognition for it.
