The City of Cape Town in partnership with GreenCape yesterday, 21 September 2022, hosted an information session with businesses in the hospitality, food manufacturing and food processing industries on requirements to submit revised integrated waste management (IWM) plans to the City before 31 October 2022.

For some time now, since the adoption of the Integrated Waste Management By-law, every business in Cape Town has been required to develop Integrated Waste Management Plans to cover all aspects of waste management including:

An assessment of the quantity and type of waste generated
A description of the services required to store, collect, transport and dispose of the waste
A plan to separate recyclable and non-recyclable material at the point of source
A waste minimisation plan
A pollution prevention plan
Details of potential environmental impact of the waste
The type or characteristics of environmentally sensitive waste
The amount of natural resources consumed in the manufacturing or production process that result in waste
The targets for recovery of waste (minimisation, re-use, recycling)
Programmes and targets to minimise the consumption of natural resources
Revised IWM plans due before October 31 2022 now also need to detail how a specific business intends to reduce their organic waste by 50% before the end of the year (2022), and to eliminate organic waste that is sent to landfill by 2027.

Attendees were provided with guidance and insight into successful waste minimisation practices and how to incorporate these into their own integrated waste management plans.

‘With the risk of global warming becoming more apparent every day, it’s never been more important to realise the impact of the food waste problem.
‘Whether you’re throwing away whole loaves of bread, or scraping the remnants of a salad into your trash can, every shred of food that makes it to the landfill has a grave impact on the environment. Food waste that’s left in a landfill produces huge amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas with a very high impact on our environment,’ said Mayoral Committee Member for Urban Waste Management, Alderman Grant Twigg.

Cape Town has a very robust private organic waste processing sector offering many alternatives to landfilling. Organic waste processing solutions include animal feed, composting, protein recycling and energy generation.

To find out more about the private services offered to the organic waste generating sector (including hospitality, food manufacturing and processing industries), the City recommends that people should contact the following non-profit organisations who have a list of all its members offering the different processing solutions:

Source: City Of Cape Town