It’s garbage collection day. I was once a big bottle of cooldrink being enjoyed on a hot summers day, but now I’ve been thrown away in a thin orange bag and dumped next to a dirty black sack on the street corner.
It’s garbage collection day. I was once a big bottle of cooldrink being enjoyed on a hot summers day, but now I’ve been thrown away in a thin orange bag and dumped next to a dirty black sack on the street corner.
The household I come from has taken time every week to carefully separate the recyclables, washing the glass, tins, polystyrene, cooldrink bottles and plastic bags and neatly folding up newspapers.
Almost immediately, people emerge to rummage through the bag I’m in, hunting for any remaining scraps of food and strewing some rubbish in the street.
Then we are all thrown into the back of the white municipal garbage truck and mixed with all the other rubbish in the black bags.
Makana Municipality collects both disposable and recyclable materials in the same truck. When we reach the landfill site, the truck pours its contents out, burying me under a mountain of filthy garbage.
The Masihlule workers – wearing blue overalls, gloves, boots and yellow fluorescent vests – then move in, tediously sieving through the rubbish for bags full of recyclable material.
There are 19 sorters. Each has three containers, one for plastics, one for cardboard, and a drum for glass bottles. Sorters are paid by local recycling companies for every kilogram of recyclable material collected.
There are over 20 other people scavenging through the piles of rubbish for food and salvageable materials. This is where the conflict begins.
Tin cans are a treasure in the dump, selling for up to 50 cents a kilogram to the local scrap yard next door to the dump.
Workers get angry when non-workers take these precious metals. No one fights over plastic bottles though. They have other plans for us.
We are shredded into tiny pieces at the dump, and then transported to Makana Glass & Bottle Recyclers on Samson Street. On average they will churn out three enormous sacks of shredded plastic a day.
The shreds are then melted down and made into polytimber planks. Once a flimsy empty bottle, I now have similar properties to wood in texture and use.
However, unlike regular lumber, I won’t absorb moisture, rot or splinter. Finally I’m sculpted into outdoor furniture by Enviro Furn, a manufacturer in the same warehouse. It takes 5 000 plastic bags or 2 500 plastic bottles to make a polytimber bench.
Once a discarded plastic bottle, I’m now a bench in the garden or the bridge in the Botanical Gardens or the walkway that surrounds the Rotary Peace Pool.
A two-seater picnic bench and table retails for R1 560. Polytimber outdoor furniture is available from Enviro Furn at 4 Samson Street, Grahamstown.
For more information call: 046 622 3829 Clear bags are available from Makana Municipality Treasury (the office in High Street where you pay your lights and water accounts) or from Grahamstown Packing & Catering (corner of New and Hill Street).
Orange or yellow tinted bags are available from local supermarkets. For more info, contact Angie Thomson on 046 636 1201, or 073 387 6496
