The Recycling and Economic Development Initiative of South Africa (Redisa) is heading to court in a bid to stop government’s new Industry Waste Tyre Management Plan (IWTMP) dead in its tracks.
Waste tyres are a big problem in the country with its car parc of approximately 13 million vehicles. Redisa estimates that as many as one million waste tyres are generated per month, the equivalent of around 14,000 tonnes of rubber.
“To give you a visual, it would be approximately a back-to-back line of tyres from Cape Town to Johannesburg,” said Stacey Jansen, Director at Redisa.
The IWTMP thus provides a comprehensive framework for the “efficient and effective management of the waste tyre sector in a circular manner,” as per the Department of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment (DFFE).
In layman’s terms, government intends to transform the industry from a linear to a circular economy where these used tyres are recycled and repurposed by local service providers through a process that creates little to no waste.
The IWTMP was developed in accordance with Section 29 of the National Environmental Management: Waste Act 2008, aiming to address several challenges faced by the waste tyre sector such as limited local processing capacity, storage depot limitations, and logistical constraints.
The IWTMP received a delayed approval in March 2024 by ex-Minister of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment, Barbara Creecy, shortly before taking up her new position as Minister of Transport.
Due to fail
Jansen explains that a few decades ago, there were no methods or strategies to deal with waste tyres in South Africa, and neither did government’s budget allow for the expensive exercise.
Redisa thus devised a strategy through which waste tyres could be brought back into the economy in other ways, funded by a R2.30+VAT/kg environmental tyre levy, which was officially gazetted in November 2012 and is colloquially referred to as the “Redisa plan.”
Tyre collections kicked off in February 2013 and lasted until 2017, with Redisa able to divert 98% of all waste tyres in South Africa into the recycling industry over this period which in turn created over 3,500 employment opportunities, said Jansen.
However, the Minister of Environmental Affairs at the time placed Redisa under liquidation in 2017 due to the alleged misappropriation of funds obtained through the new tyre levy.
While the Supreme Court of Appeal eventually overturned this decision in 2019, the waste tyre management plan was “illegally destroyed” when Redisa was thrust into liquidation, it said.
The state of waste tyre management has deteriorated dramatically since then, due in large part to the “inherent difficulty of a government agency dealing with operational matters in a complex and changing environment with an inadequate budget and under the constraints of the Public Finance Management Act,” said Redisa.
After reviewing the final IWTMP approved in March 2024, Redisa branded it as unlawful, irrational, unreasonable, and procedurally unfair, and it lodged a court application on 16 September 2024 to review and set aside the strategy.
Jansen told CapeTalk that the IWTMP is “due for failure” as it does not include one critical aspect – funding.
“What is absent from this plan is a funding model, it’s very vague and, in fact, it’s not even a plan, it’s a plan to develop multiple plans because you have multiple implementers developing multiple business plans,” said Jansen.
“It’s very difficult to actually understand how things will flow and work under this plan.”
Furthermore, Redisa CEO Herman Erdmann told MoneyWeb that the IWTMP is “fundamentally flawed in its conception and incapable of meeting its required purpose.”
The plan was initially drafted to take effect on 1 April 2023 with the goal of have the country’s stockpile of waste tyres entirely eliminated by 2038 to reach a so-called “steady state” in the sector.
According to Erdmann, this will necessitate the country to immediately increase its waste tyre processing capacity by 339%, from 35,355 to 123,372 tonnes per year.
Annual increases of between 10% and 20% would be required in the following five years, after which the cost of these increases would outweigh their benefits.
Even if it were to be successfully implemented, which Erdmann thinks is a long shot, the IWTMP in its current state will lead to “destructive socio-economic consequences, the implications of which have not been considered.”
“The plan is devised in such a way that at the end of the 15-year period when the stockpile is used up and the ‘steady state’ is reached, the thriving and growing processing industry that will have been created, with a capacity of over 476,000 tons per year [and] a 1,310% increase since the plan’s commencement, will immediately have to shed more than 40% of that capacity to a mere 303,183 tons a year, with concomitant economic chaos, including permanent loss of jobs,” said Erdmann.
“It is thus on the basis of the DFFE’s own reported statistics that … it is patently obvious to any person without any special expertise that the approved IWTMP is practically and economically irrational and unreasonable.”
The group’s court application thus seeks to review and set aside the IWTMP as it claims it:
- Unconstitutionally breaches the principle of legality in that it is irrational
- Unconstitutionally infringes on a section in the Constitution in that it is not a reasonable measure for the prevention of pollution and ecological degradation or to secure ecologically sustainable development while promoting justifiable economic and social development
- Unlawfully contravenes the National Environmental Management Act and Water Act, as well as various policy instruments that were and are legally binding on the former and current ministers
- Constitutes unlawful, irrational, unreasonable and procedurally unfair administrative action under various sections of the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act
Redisa states that South Africa is “sitting on a ticking time bomb” – referring to the tonnes of waste tyres filling up landfills around the country – and that it can not afford to delay the implementation of a functional IWTMP.
“We saw the fire at Biesiesvlei, we’ve seen the environmental degradation that happens with tyre waste, and we know of all the illegal dumping that happens if you do not have some kind of incentive for people to channel their tyres into an organised systematic system where South Africa and the economy benefits,” concluded Jansen.
The Department of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment has confirmed that it has received Redisa’s court application but that it will only provide comment once considering its merits.
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