Success Stories South Africa

Valorization of waste and creation of employment

• • The Msunduzi City Region faces many challenges such as illegal waste dumping, methane gas fires at the landfill site and turf wars between illegal waste recyclers. The RUNRES project is providing solutions to some of the challenges faced by the city region through waste valorisation.
  • RUNRES South Africa has managed to process 3336 tons of green waste and 884 tons of sewage sludge through the co-composting innovation led by Duzi-Turf. More than 7000 tons of green waste and 1500 tons of sludge have been diverted from the landfills since the beginning of the project.
  • The RUNRES project through the co-composting innovation has also allowed for the employment of approximately 13 workers, thereby improving the livelihoods of local people. Most importantly the co-composting process has managed to reduce pathogen loads in compost to levels recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and South African regulations for safe agricultural use.

    

    Duzi Turf employees working for the RUNRES co-composting innovation

Government recognition and pathways to policy influence

• RUNRES South Africa has attracted local and national attention and was invited to various platforms including for example a provincial waste management workshop themed “Waste Economy – Addressing Waste Management and Unlocking Opportunities in the Circular Economy”.
• Further the Directorate of the Sanitation Services Support and the Department of Water & Sanitation (DWS) visited RUNRES project sites. After this visit, RUNRES South Africa was invited to contribute to the development of the National Faecal Sludge Management (FSM) strategy and the National Sanitation Framework. They are now part of the National Sanitation Task Team (NSTT), a national think tank that provides the DWS with technical support in developing policy frameworks.
• RUNRES South Africa has also presented at various DWS policymaking platforms notably, the Provincial Faecal Sludge Management Consultative Workshop held in Durban (2021) and the National Water and Sanitation Summit in Pretoria (2022).
• Engaging with DWS is a significant achievement that we are incredibly proud of because it will allow us to influence policy and could ease the scaling out of the RUNRES innovations to other provinces.

Visit to Duzi Turf by senior officials from the Department of Water and Sanitation

The director of the Department of Water and Sanitation (Iris Mathye) is inspecting co-composting packaging at Duzi Turf