DISTELL’S GREENUP CLOSES THE LOOP ON WASTE
Distell Group Ltd, a leading brewing and beverage company, has partnered with the Western Cape’s Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning and Cape Town City Council, to form GreenUp. Established in 2019, the goal of this private/public partnership was to clean up the Khayelitsha settlement in Cape Town, while also generating jobs and building skills.
The first step was to start clearing the area of beverage packaging and other solid waste, and waste pickers were equipped with protective gear and custom-built trolleys. They were trained in collecting, separating and processing what is described as ‘post-consumer materials’ for recycling. They are also taught business and operational skills to negotiate with and supply their pickings to recyclable buy-back centres, where the materials are processed for on-sale to packaging manufacturers.
It is estimated that these waste pickers/environmental assistants each collect a daily average of 200kg of recyclables that would otherwise find their way into landfills. The waste comes from households, taverns, streets and informal dumps.
Most recently, GreenUp has begun a glass recycling initiative in KZN, working with Heineken. Distell also runs a bottle retrieval and recycling initiative known as the Bottle Recovery programme. While this project helps to lower the company’s packaging footprint even further, it also provides a much-needed source of supply, given the worldwide shortage of bottles. The Glass Recycling Company estimates that glass recycling has produced income-generating opportunities for approximately 50 000 waste pickers countrywide. They collect glass to sell to buy-back centres which in turn sell the cullet (crushed glass) to manufacturers who use it to produce new glass packaging.
Last year, GreenUp won the recycling game-changer award at PETCO, South Africa’s environmental awards initiative recognising excellence in re-use, recycling and waste minimisation in the plastics industry.
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