A nearly ten year long battle has been dragging on in Drakenstein, between ratepayers and public committees, and the municipal executive, over a massive and profoundly expensive waste-to-energy operation. Five years ago, the municipality promised residents who had complained about insufficiencies in the environmental impact assessment, that the project was being mothballed.

But in a monumental move, the Drakenstein municipality has acquired a grant from the national government of R1.4-billion for a new project, ostensibly aimed at upgrading and refurbishing the Paarl Wastewater Treatment Works (WWTW) in the Western Cape, as part of the first phase of the new Budget Facility for Infrastructure (BFI) initiative.

The refurbishment of the wastewater treatment plant is slated to span over three financial years, and construction has begun for another phase focused on the construction of the Southern Paarl Bulk Sewer to ensure long-term sustainability and resilience.

This project addresses the renewal of aging infrastructure, capacity enhancements, and modernisation, which is welcome. The town has seen a growth in private housing developments with the semigration wave, as minorities flee the decay in the South African interior.

But the announcement also makes clear that the grant will enable a biogas energy generation project, the same project that was rejected by the community, and which the municipality promised to scrap. Thus this infrastructural grant also appears to contribute towards a dormant project which has caused consternation among residents for years – a means for generating a waste-to-energy plant.

The W2E project was officially cancelled in 2018, after residents objected to the impact on local rates, and the improper environmental impact assessment (EIA), which did not fully account for the emissions quality, nor take into account the direction and flow of wind in the town, which tends to settle and collect over the residential areas in the valley, causing toxic particles to settle in a dense cloud over the town.

For almost a hundred years, Wellington was nicknamed “Smellington”, because of a pall of sulphuric gas that hung over the town from the nearby tannery, now thankfully closed and converted to small shops and offices.

A return to these conditions under a cloud of burnt garbage, containing not just foul-smelling compounds, as a tannery would emit, but also potentially hazardous compounds, as municipal waste contains, was precisely what was being objected to.

The flawed EIA report cost a total of R20m, and failed to account for smaller waste particles released from the exhaust stack of the planned biogas generator, which are capable of entering the bloodstream, and for which there is no technology capable of filtering.

It was to be located next to the landfill, 800m from the Berg River, and adjacent to the wastewater treatment plant.

Johan de Waal represented the community to assist in cancelling this project. But with each delay on the project, the municipality’s quoted price went up. Starting at R450m in 2014, the project ballooned to R1.2bn by 2018.

According to a study from the University of Cape Town, the capital investment for the most expensive biogas plant in the country amounted to only R175m, the Bio2Watt in Bronkhorstspruit. The same study quotes the Drakenstein plans as costing only R99m, with a power capacity of 2.87 MW, which would make it the second-biggest biogas plant in the country.

This is far lower than even the initial public quote for the value of the project.

Documents leaked from the municipality to the local ratepayers demonstrated that on the same day as the public announcement of the project’s cancellation, the mayor’s office wrote to Barbara Creecy for extension and funding, which today’s news shows has been granted.

The municipality is suffering under a long term overextension of its budget, with an outstanding debt of over R1.5bn, and low revenue sources.

Such biogas generators are only assessed for certain categories of biological waste. The volume of these categories of waste, Paarl sources of waste have only 40-45% in the lower income areas, and 1-2% in higher income areas. The total waste/fuel requirement of the plant was 600 tons per day, while the municipality only produces around 200t per day, making the municipal sources insufficient to meet the energy requirements of the plant.

Because there was insufficient waste to justify the project, the municipality, during the preparation phase for this project, also published a bylaw prohibiting local companies from recycling or taking the waste to out of the municipal area. This, despite there being existing issues with locating new landfill sites as the present ones are filling up.

In the bylaw, the municipality reclassified several kinds of waste as “General waste”, which is now illegal for private operators to process, and is the exclusive property of the municipality. Recycling in the municipality is also banned, as is the removal of waste to be processed outside the municipality.

This has led to a snowball effect which has made refuse disposal expensive and bureaucratic, and resulted in widespread flytipping.

Most residents who require additional waste removed (aside from what is taken in wheelie bins) often resort to unlicensed operators, who dump the waste in locations along the river or in Bain’s Kloof pass. The municipality already pays around R14m a year to collect illegal dumping as a result from this activity.

The weigh-in systems at local landfills are currently not properly operational, despite new scales having been ordered. The display systems for the weight are not functional, which suggests that the rates applied to incoming waste is eyeballed, rather than costed on actual weight.

Building rubble, six inches of which is necessary for topping off landfills, is classified to exclude tiles, unlike every other municipality in the country. If it contains tiles, it is categorised as “general waste”, requiring a lab sample report to overturn the categorisation. This means that new cover material, which used to be free to offload, now costs constructors to offload at the landfill if even one tile is found in the rubble.

The nature of public contracting in this sector remains opaque, and residents and committees are often prohibited from enquiring.

Every year, the recycling companies and skip operators now have to apply for new licences to operate, and the municipality, having legally declared all household waste to be property of the municipality, allows only fridges, lounge suites and beds, and certain categories of industrial waste, are allowed to be privately removed.

Other concerns ratepayers addressed were the failure to provide new landfill sites, as the available ones were now full. A regional landfill site study was quoted as costing R2m and 2 years for the evaluation alone, and 3 years for construction.

The municipality, in preparing the way for the W2E project, went so far as to stuff the legally mandated landfill monitoring committee with friendly faces, in order to replace the chairman Allen Harris, whose research provided the factual analysis which undermined the EIA. They also published slanderous materials to destroy the credibility of critics, which caused ratepayers to issue a cease and desist letter.

The new national grant serves a clearly unsound and wasteful project, whose lack of viability was known and acknowledged. The hostility shown to locals for raising concerns demonstrates a pattern of contempt for the public, which accompanies other serious allegations of corruption against the Mayor Conrad Poole.

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