A piece of land near Tsamaya road in Mamelodi that was a well known dumping site has been cleaned up by the City. Picture: Jacques Naude/African News Agency (ANA)
Pretoria - The City of Tshwane said it had cleared 2 343 illegal dumping sites in just two months.
Environmental and Agricultural Management MMC Dana Wannenberg said 671 were illegal dumping hot spots.
The MMC said they were starting with educational projects to help people understand the financial, health and environmental impact the sites had.
“A lot of the dumping is caused by backroom dwellers or households that have a lot of members living there, where one dustbin is not enough because it gets filled up quickly and they have to remove it from their yards,” he said.
Wannenberg said that they intended looking into how landlords disposed of rubbish from their properties and work out a solution for that.
He said service delivery was their main priority, however the backlog was big because every time they cleaned up, another site popped up and they had to clean it up again.
Wannenburg added that they were investigating new ways, where larger containers were placed near illegal sites for the community to use.
“We recently cleaned a big place in Soshanguve where we cleaned hundreds of (disposable nappies), and we suspect it must have been a crèche or some kind of facility where there are a lot of babies, because you don’t easily find that many nappies in one place.
“We are busy with control measures, and we also got the metro police involved so that we are going to start to fine people,” he said.
He said there was a new fine schedule that had been recently approved by the magistrate’s court.
He added that he recently received a lot of complaints from Pretoria North residents about people burning the rubbish, which was a huge problem because of the serious health risk it posed.
Executive mayor Randall Williams said waste management teams assigned to clean the sites had been issued with “No illegal dumping” signs to erect after cleaning up.
He said from the first week of November until January 19, a total of 2 343 sites had been cleared, of which 671 were at hot spots where illegal dumping was recurring.
“The City is continuously monitoring these locations to catch the culprits who choose to dump illegally, and will also deploy additional skips in areas that are problematic to prevent community members from dumping on open land.
“The City is continuously expanding the service of its waste management departments to ensure that areas around the city are continuously having their refuse removed,” he said.
Pretoria News
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