INTERWASTE
FINDS VALUE IN
WHAT OTHERS
DISCARD.
In 2008 consumer goods company
Unilever SA sent 151 000 tons of
waste to landfill. By 2013 it had
reduced this to 50 000 tons and by
January this year the multinational
achieved its goal of sending
absolutely no general waste to a
landfill site.
July 2016 is the second target: zero
hazardous waste to landfill.
Unilever is ahead of the curve
in SA. Globally the disposal of
waste to landfill is frowned
upon and South Africa is actively
tightening legislation in this regard.
This is forcing companies and
municipalities to pay more attention
to their waste streams.
They have to. SA produced 108
million tons of waste in 2011 and
less than a tenth of that is recycled.
Aside from the fact that landfills are
unsightly and produce toxic gases
and ‘teas’, South African towns and
cities are running out of space to
dump their waste.
(See: Pie graphs).
This is creating opportunities for
waste management companies like
JSE-listed Interwaste.
“This is a small company with lots of
opportunity to grow,” says Brendon
Hubbard, a fund manager at Clucas
Gray, which owns 7.5% of the
company. “They operate in a space
in which demand for their type of
essential service can only increase,
where municipalities haven’t
planned well.”
Over the past decade Interwaste
has transformed itself from a
“hump and dump” operator that
simply collected waste and trucked
it to third party facilities, into
an end-to-end integrated waste
management service provider.
This means investing in its own
facilities – landfill sites, waste-toenergy plants, waste sorting sites,
and its own fleet of 400 trucks.
“This is a capital intensive process,”
says group financial director André
Broodryk. “We could drive earnings
up tomorrow if we stopped
ISSUE 4 – JULY 2015
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