Zero waste: how might we get there (or thereabouts)?

[Picture shows, left to right: Roberto de Carvalho, Petro Myburgh, Zukiswa Pikoli, Melanie Ludwig and Alison Evans on the podium at Maker’s Landing]

This is human nature: we see “free” food – a hotel’s self-service breakfast options, for instance, or a laden buffet at a conference – and we pile our plates.

Research tells us we’re driven by loss aversion (getting “our money’s worth”), or curiosity (sampling everything), or something else in our lizard brain that urges us to grab the calories while they’re available. But the wastage in this scenario, said Roberto de Carvalho, executive chef at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC), is eye-watering. For every ±100 people eating buffet-style, for instance, one table must be  continuously restocked. Multiply that five or ten times for your average 500-1 000-person conference, with two or three rounds of offerings if it’s an all-day affair – that’s a mountain of food.

But here’s the kicker: once food has been out on tables for four hours, in terms of health laws it can no longer be served.

And, then, there are leftovers. “We measured 10 tons of leftover food a year from plate scrapings, just people eating with their eyes and overfilling their plates,” said De Carvalho. In this hungry world, buffet-style dining can send mountains of food to waste bins.

De Carvalho was sharing the podium at a Zero Waste symposium hosted by SOLVE@Waterfront as part of the V&A Waterfront’s Zero Waste platform and in conjunction with Food Indaba 2025. The challenge to the panel: exploring pragmatic routes to radical waste reduction, starting with organic waste. To that end, the panel, moderated by Daily Maverick’s Zukiswa Pikoli, included Alison Evans, the City of Cape Town’s Head of Waste Markets, focusing on realising waste’s market value in the circularity transition; Melanie Ludwig, owner of Zero to Landfill Organics and a founding member of the Organics Recycling Association of South Africa (Orasa); and the V&A Waterfront’s own Head of Sustainability, Petro Myburgh.

WHY THE FOCUS ON FOOD WASTE?

Apart from the obscenity of trashing edible food, food waste represents also wasted water, energy, and other resources, Myburgh pointed out. It’s not just in conferencing that food waste is generated on a startling scale: Ludwig’s experience indicates that a small restaurant will produce about a tonne of organic waste a month; while a large hotel will produce about 20 times that.

 “About two and a half years ago we ramped up our efforts around organics,” said Myburgh. “We provided buckets to tenants to separate their organic waste, reinvented our training and awareness programmes, did kitchen audits, and required tenants to buy into good waste management practices.

“We now have 130 people working at our own on-site waste recovery centre, where waste from the precinct comes for further separation. Together, these efforts have had effect: from 20 tonnes a month of organics diverted from landfill, we now have 200 tonnes a month.

“But we see what comes through to our waste centre, and so we can see we still have a long way to go.”

And, of course, addressing food waste is the right thing to do: it is enshrined in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (#12): Responsible Production and Consumption.  

WHY THE FOCUS ON REMOVING ORGANICS FROM LANDFILL?

Organics create methane which, Evans pointed out, is at least 20 times more potent than CO₂ as a contributor to climate change.

“And we are running out of landfill space,” she added, noting that securing permissions and building a new landfill (no one wants one in their neighbourhood) can take 20 years. “But globally, there is a realisation that we need to live more sustainably. What that translates into is targets about diverting waste from landfill.”

The Provincial Government has therefore included in their waste management plan the admittedly ambitious goal that 100% of organic waste in the Western Cape should be diverted from landfill by 2027.

There’s also pressure from other quarters. Conference centres internationally, said De Carvalho, compete amongst other things on ESG measures, and organisers ask questions about how waste is treated, and what goes to landfill. In parallel, a growing environmental consciousness is evident among many tour operators who send guests to the Waterfront’s top hotels.

Finally, there is evidence that eliminating organics from landfill will go some way towards solving hunger. “In (the US state of) In Vermont they had a landfill ban on food; and food donations went through the roof because people were for the first time motivated,” said Ludwig.

WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES?

A big barrier, said Ludwig, is waste producers’ willingness to pay. As things stand, dropping goods off at a landfill is relatively inexpensive, especially outside of Cape Town. She argued that applying a drop-off fee at landfill sites that reflects the real cost of organic waste would make more space for the private sector to play a role; and that private sector involvement is critical to realising the value of organic waste.

“We estimate 4 000 tonnes of waste a day is organic. My business can process 250 tonnes a month. How many facilities do we need to achieve the capacity to handle 4 000 tonnes!”

Another challenge flows from ISO standards that apply to the hospitality sector, and result in millions of small items like sugar sachets, little glass jam jars, and sweet wrappers. When especially the glass items end up with organic waste, any compost is unusable, as it’s not safe to handle.

A further challenge flows from the unintended consequences of people’s good intentions. “During the drought,” Myburgh shared, “we had tenants alerting us that they were switching to disposable cutlery and crockery to save water. Of course the environmental cost of single-use plastics is higher than the environmental burden of washing crockery and cutlery.

“And we have tenants who, wanting to eliminate single-use plastics, switch to compostable take-out containers. But it takes very specific conditions to compost these , and there aren’t many facilities in Cape Town to do this.”

From the floor, one delegate shared how, although the Oranjezicht City Farm offers a composting drop-off for local residents, there is low take-up. “Few were willing to do the work, especially having to take their dirty bucket back and wash it”. So, the yuck factor. Myburgh echoed this with an anecdote about residential units at the Waterfront: “We issued five-litre buckets for food waste and asked people to decant these into the wheelie bins, and then found the buckets themselves in the wheelie bins.”

WHAT ARE SOME SOLUTIONS?

There are solutions. None are complete, but together they add up.

At government level: Since about 2016, the City of Cape Town has distributed around 50 000 free home composting containers to residents, encouraging them to divert their organic waste and make compost for their own gardens. The City has also, in its capacity as a regulator, been nudging businesses into being part of the solution, forcing them to think about their waste management by requiring large commercial waste generators to submit integrated waste management plans to the City.

Evans also spoke about positive outcomes of experiments trialling separation of food waste at source, for instance among informal traders, who have high wastage from the fruit and vegetables they sell. Her department is also trialling the distribution of sealable buckets and subsequent collection of food waste in low-income communities. There is take-up, she says, in part because of the health factor – remove organic material from the environment, and you also reduce the proliferation of rats and many diseases.

At corporate level (e.g. V&A Waterfront): While the Waterfront management company itself is not a big waste producer, the waste generated by the hundreds of businesses on site, along with 13 hotels and thousands of residents, adds up to significant volumes. Its waste-minimisation strategy, Myburgh said, is built around separation at source; incentives; and education and awareness. “Rather than enforcing change through formal policies, we seek to win hearts and minds, incentivising and rewarding those who align with our sustainable values. We collaborate to raise the bar for waste management innovation.”

At restaurant level (e.g. CTICC): “We do more than the usual,” said De Carvalho. “Used cooking oil goes to biodiesel; fat traps go to composting; we’ve put a rooftop garden in on CTICC2, and use what we compost there. We’ve looked at biodigesters but haven’t got there yet.

“We also prepare up to 9 000 staff meals a month, using food that we recover from our banqueting.” As an experiment rooted in behavioural economics, the CTICC has explored putting out smaller plates, to see whether people dish up less at buffets and therefore leave less waste on their plates (it works). Next up, perhaps: smaller dishing-up spoons, to see whether that has any impact on waste.

The panel also urged commercial kitchens to make things practical for staff. For instance, edible food earmarked for donation is usually present in the serving area. Here, cleanable and stackable cliplock containers can be kept to be packed for later collection by food distribution agencies. Similarly most contamination occurs at the post-consumer stage, where bins should be provided strictly for organics. It is also useful to provide an organics bin where, for instance, salads are prepared.

At a personal level: Get over the yuck factor, and find somewhere convenient to drop off your organics if you have no home composting capability.

And, say Myburgh and Ludwig, be thoughtful. For instance, a knife doubles the volume of edible food you’d cut away before cooking – switch to a vegetable peeler. And, drink tap water, without lemon or cucumber (and without a plastic straw).

RESOURCES

• See Daily Maverick’s coverage of the panel discussion here.
• The City of Cape Town launched its new Waste Strategy in July.
• Ludwig referenced the useful UK app Guardians of Grub for the hospitality sector. It’s worth a trawl for any of us, but there’s a similarly useful app, Love Food Hate Waste, directed to private individuals

ABOUT FOOD INDABA

Food Indaba is an annual programme of talks and events that focus on the food system. It brings together a wide range of voices involved in shaping food systems, providing opportunities for food growers, academics, activists, writers, nutritionists, policymakers, food lovers, and anyone interested in meaningful change to engage with key issues connected to the food we eat and the future of food. The goal, ultimately, is to foster a healthier, more resilient, and more just food system.

This year’s provocative theme: Artificial Intelligence and the Food System triggered a number of thoughts during the Zero Waste Summit:

• V&A is already testing the intelligence that can be gleaned regarding better material type identification, and thus more efficient sorting, by using AI on a conveyer belt in its Waste Collection & Recycling Centre. Similarly, the planned waste-to-energy plant may have AI on feeder belts.
• In future, and in the context of producer responsibility, AI may be able to be used to identify, and hold responsible, the producer of problematic items.

ABOUT SOLVE@WATERFRONT

SOLVE is a not for profit established by the Waterfront to help it build a better world, specifically through giving effect to strategic projects that fall outside business-as-usual, and which may positively influence the broader ecosystem and other entities globally. It has a particular research and thought-leadership mandate.

The Zero Waste focus gives effect to the V&A’s sustainability strategy, of which seeking circular solutions to city-making problems plays a significant role.