Khanyi Thonga wants to start a recycling revolution

Centurion resident Khanyi Thonga has a passion for protecting and preserving the environment and wishes to inspire others to do the same.

Thonga runs her own recycling project in The Reeds and is looking to conduct a study into how best to formalise waste picking with the support of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), City of Tshwane and University of Pretoria.

She said her recycling project already serviced half the residences in the street and attracting further considerable participation.

“In December 2021, I, amongst eight other students, won the Unisa Innovation Challenge which has contributed greatly towards my project.

“I was fortunate to be given seed funding, incubation, mentorship among other prizes,” she said.

In 2022 Thonga and her fellow students opened a recycling business buying from informal waste pickers.

She said engaging with waste pickers had given her a unique insight into the problems pertaining to recycling and that would enable her to come up with solutions that suited everybody in the recycling ecosystem best.

“I am now in pursuit of a study which will look at gated estates, comparing the quantities of recyclables to non-recyclables produced in that estate,” she said.

She added that gated estates were the largest landfill dumpers of recyclable waste.

She said the study would look into “the average ratio of recyclable to non-recyclable waste households produced and the annual potential size of the market”.

“We know that 80-90% of recyclables collected annually in South Africa is recovered by waste pickers, but we don’t know what the recycling potential is.

“If we don’t know what the recycling potential is, we are nowhere near finding solutions for the pressing issues within this industry,” she said.

Thonga hoped that within 12 months they would have supplied almost every household in the estate with a recycling bin to kick-start a ‘recycling culture’ within the community.

She said if the estates in her area started sorting their waste at source, they would save additional waste removal fees.

“I am calling on gated estates to embrace this project, in order to prevent further development of informal recycling settlements.

“I’ve approached a few estates who are yet to give me responses. I’m calling for estates around the City of Tshwane – especially Centurion – to give us an opportunity to run this project within their estate,” Thonga said.

“The data collected will be formally published and made available to everyone who wishes to make use of it.

“For the publication of the collected data, I will be assisted by credible researchers and research organisations as well as the City of Tshwane,” she said.

Thonga thanked ward councillor Dana Wannenburg for organising her meeting with the metro officials that gave her techniques and strategies to undertake her research.

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