Cape Town's Mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, has announced the successful auction of R36 million worth of carbon credits, derived from waste-to-energy initiatives that mitigate gas emissions at municipal landfill sites. The proceeds from this auction are earmarked for urban waste management projects, with the dual aim of reducing pollution and enhancing environmental health within the city.

The Cape Town Council decided to auction these carbon credits to capitalize on "attractive rates," as the demand for credits in the South African market currently exceeds supply by a factor of 3.4. These credits were accrued for each ton of greenhouse gas (GHG) eliminated through city projects registered under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) scheme.

The CDM scheme is a carbon-offset initiative that allows countries to fund GHG-reducing projects in other nations and claim the saved emissions towards their own international emission targets. Cape Town has installed landfill gas infrastructure at Bellville, Coastal Park, and Vissershok landfill sites to curb methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas with a global warming potential approximately 25 times greater than CO2.

Hill-Lewis: “We are just getting started in scaling up our waste-to-energy initiatives at our landfill sites. These projects are win-win: they reduce emissions, generate electricity, and bring in revenue from carbon credit sales for further infrastructure investment.”

Urban Waste Management MMC Grant Twigg added, “We expect our landfill waste-to-energy initiatives to pay for themselves over time, between the sale of carbon credits and reduced bulk electricity purchases from Eskom.” The process involves extracting methane gas from landfill sites using perforated pipes or wells, which is then used as fuel to generate electricity for operations at these sites.

Hill-Lewis also highlighted that around 40% of Cape Town's R120 billion, ten-year infrastructure pipeline is dedicated to enhancing the city's climate change resilience. “This includes major investments in water and sanitation, as well as improvements in waste management,” he noted.

‍But as the project in Wellington has showed, the waste-to-energy scheme is based on overpriced and deeply inaccurate environmental impact assessments which discount the toxins which can be spread by burning masses of urban waste. The Wellington project also carries a public price tag in excess of five times the price quoted from the manufacturer in a UCT study on the sector.

The tenacity of the DA local government in ramming through the project has involved several lies to the public, including approaching ANC ministers for funding after promising to end the project when it was demonstrated to be detrimental to the local quality of life. They even resorted to booting out council representatives who criticised the project.

After a ten-year struggle to prevent the plant from being built, Wellington residents are now launching a legal case.

While the scheme may net the DA-run local governments an extra source of revenue, the allocation of these funds remains resilient to public criticism.