Cape Town - In the V&A Waterfront’s stride to eliminate single-use plastics in its precinct, the entity signed up with the SA Plastics Pact in hopes of lessening the impact of plastics on the environment, however getting the Waterfront precinct completely plastic-free will take much work.
The Plastics Pact was a collaborative initiative to keep plastic out of the environment by changing the way plastic products and packaging was designed, used and reused in South Africa.
It ultimately sought to develop a circular economy for plastics packaging.
As a sea-facing property, V&A custodial services senior manager Petro Myburgh said the V&A precinct saw first-hand the amount of waste – particularly plastic – which polluted the ocean and shoreline thus joining the SA Plastics Pact was one more step the Waterfront took to become “a neighbourhood free of single-use plastics”.
“We know that a total of 94% of waste on South African beaches is plastics, with 77% of it being single-use plastics,” Myburgh said.
Together with Ocean Pledge, the Waterfront was also launching a new research study involving restaurants in its food court area in an attempt to eliminate single-use plastic and implement a campaign that encouraged a shift in consumer behaviour.
Ocean Pledge founder Diony Lalieu said similar programmes in the US showed the potential annual cost saving per restaurant of around R57 000 and 891 kg of plastic.
Lalieu said this project hoped to realise R250 000 in savings between the participating restaurants while removing a significant amount of plastics and creating a blueprint for food courts in other shopping malls to follow.
“We are in the process of identifying which tenants will participate in the pledge but we know that the largest amount of wasteful single-use plastic comes from fast food outlets, so this is where our initial focus will be,” Myburgh said.
Myburgh added that reducing the large amounts of plastic polluted into the ocean required a collective effort – but it had to extend beyond the private sector to include government and the consumer.
The Waterfront’s experience indicated the challenges to transitioning from single-use plastic include human resistance to change, lack of awareness, lack of sufficient legislation and negative reinforcers, lack of cost-effective alternatives, resistance from manufacturers and lack of enforcement.
