Chairperson, hon Minister, thank you very much for your responses, especially when you are dealing with the challenges that are facing municipalities around financing waste management as well as the technology thereof. One of the biggest problems is the lack of public awareness on the part of the communities, especially around the issues of sanitary improvements. Does the department have a plan with working with municipalities to attend to that particular area of public awareness? Thank you.
The MINISTER OF ENVIRONMENT, FORESTRY AND FISHERIES: That is a
really important question, hon member. You would be aware that over many, many years, there have been a lot of public awareness campaigns around littering. The question that we have to ask is: Why have they not changed behaviour? One of the issues that we are currently researching as a department is whether we can do a baseline study on citizen understanding of environmental question and one of those questions would obviously be the issue of why it is that you should not through waste into the environment. We want to do that because we don't think that it is productive to spend more money on so-called citizen awareness campaigns, unless we understand how we will measure the success - against what will we measure the success of those particular campaigns.
So, we have a lot of outreach programmes that are working in schools. We have the Good Green Deeds. We do community awareness, but immediately after you leave that community, people go back to disposing of waste in ways that we would not prefer.
So, we want to do the baseline study. Let us also look at how to disaggregate your public when we do the public-awareness campaigns, because the public is not just one amorphous mass. The reasons that people litter is not the same, particularly given the fact that you could have people that think that it is wrong to throw their rubbish on the side of the road, but they don't have an alternative.
So, if we are going to raise citizen awareness about where you should not through your rubbish, you also have to be in a position to tell them where they can throw it. From the work that we have been doing, I don't think we can answer that question in all municipalities. Thank you.
Afrikaans: