LEGAL COMPLIANCE
Managing your waste to achieve legal compliance Waste in South Africa is currently governed by means of a number of pieces of legislation. This can make understanding your responsibility as a generator, disposer, or transpor ter of waste challenging. By Garyn Rapson & Lerato Molefi*
W
aste management is complex and is embedded in various pieces of environmental legislation, including the National Environmental Management Act (No. 107 of 1998; NEMA), the National Environmental Management: Waste Act (No. 59 of 2008; the ‘Waste Act’), and the National Water Act (No. 36 of 1998; NWA). Waste is defined in the law as any substance, material or object that is (or is intended to be) unwanted, rejected, abandoned, discarded or disposed of by the holder, whether it can be reused, recycled or recovered, and includes all wastes as defined in the Waste Act. However, waste ceases to be waste in these cases: • once an application for its reuse, recycling or recover y has been approved or, after such approval, once it is, or has been, reused, recycled or recovered • where approval is not required, once a waste is, or has been, reused, recycled or recovered • w here the Minister of Forestr y, Fisheries and the Environment (‘the Minister’) has exempted any waste, or a por tion of waste generated by a par ticular process from the definition of waste
20
AUGUST 2021
|
ReSource
•w here the Minister has excluded any waste stream or a por tion of a waste stream from the definition of waste. A key legal principle of waste management is the ‘cradle to grave’ principle, the effect of which is that the generator of waste bears responsibility for the environmental, health and safety consequences of its waste throughout its life cycle – i.e. from generation to disposal. It is wor thy to note that the Waste Act defines a ‘holder of waste’ as any person who imports, generates, stores, accumulates, transports, processes, treats, exports, or disposes of waste. Therefore, companies that generate waste and temporarily store it, as well as companies contracted to transport, treat and/or dispose of such waste, i.e. waste management contractors, are classified as ‘holders of waste’ in terms of the Waste Act. Understanding the definition of a holder of waste plays an impor tant role in understanding how responsibility is divided between the generator of waste and the disposer/transpor ter of that waste, as well as compliance necessar y for both par ties. To assist with legal compliance, we have produced the checklist table to the right. *Garyn Rapson and Lerato Molefi are both environmental law exper ts at Webber Wentzel.
