Addreing waste management in Africa

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On Friday 6 September Al Jazeera s global talk show South 2 North, Redi Tlhabi chats about waste with Kenyan Cecilia Njenga, head of the United Nations Environmental Programme.

Tlhabi is also joined in studio by Canadian Melanie Samson, African waste sector specialist at WIEGO and post-doctoral fellow at The Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) and South African Jason Drew, environmental capitalist and co-founder of AgriProtein.

Waste management is increasingly becoming one of the greatest challenges, particularly for a highly urbanising world, says Njenga. In most of our cities, particularly in Africa, we are increasingly seeing municipalities not having the capacity to manage this waste.

We re seeing it in dump sites; we re seeing the health effects of this waste, affecting our children here in Africa; we are seeing increasingly, particularly, clean water being affected by the seepage of pollutants from the waste We need to take some urgent action.

Samson says African governments and municipalities have tried to adopt formal recycling programmes from advanced European economies. These have proven to be completely inappropriate socially and in terms of achieving recycling goals.

She adds, I find it quite ironic that we as residents discriminate against the people who go through the rubbish and we re repulsed that they will go through our waste instead of being repulsed with ourselves for producing so much waste.

Drew explains his award-winning AgriProtein product, Magmeal, which turns organic waste into high-protein feed for animals.

A third of all of the fish we take out of the seas is ground up and made into fishmeal that goes into our industrial agricultural processes. We should leave our fish in the sea to be eaten by humans, not by farm animals, he says.

AgriProtein is now developing a domestic and small-scale kit. Everyone takes it for granted today that we should recycle our glass and plastic, but within 15 years from now you will consider it absolutely normal to recycle your waste nutrients, he says.

This week s episode premieres at 19h30 GMT on Friday 6 September and also screens on Saturday at 14h30, Sunday at 04h30 and Monday at 08h30.

For more information, visit http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/south2north/ where all episodes are available to watch online.

Catch up on last week s episode, where Redi discussed hunting for justice at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr3-JlJkqmE.

LINK:	http://www.screenafrica.com/page/news/africa/1633945-Addressing-waste-...
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