Chair, hon members and delegates, I think as responsible political leaders of this country, we must put the citizens first on our agendas and make positive contributions to their lives, because we feel that cheap politicking or vote-touting make no positive contribution to our people. It is usually those who have no programmes or anything to offer to our people who try to distract us from the real visions and real and noble cause of this new democratic Government.
It is our people who suffered in the past and, even now, are being made to suffer in a very subtle way. The communities are getting confused and we should please not rub salt on the open wounds that are there. We definitely would like to focus on assisting our people and making a difference in their lives, and what we hear, we will take as noise pollution and nothing else. [Laughter.]
To make some comments on what has been said, it is true that certain harbours have been repaired by private businesses. That is true. The businesses offered to do so and, anyway, the deputy director-general is on his way to thank them. They offered to do it, and it is good. We are working in partnership with business and civil society, and there is nothing wrong with that. We have now budgeted R10 million to repair those harbours.
Coming to Noel Williams, he was appointed within the legal parameters. We can go on investigating, but we do not have the time. We want to deliver to our people. [Interjections.]
With regard to harbour fees, we have had a meeting. We have discussed this, and we have said that the people who are involved in fishing must come and tell us about it. We are waiting for them to bring their proposals and we are going to sit down with them. In fact, those harbour fees were set by those hon members' government because they were in government. I think we must not waste our time. [Interjections.] Please listen to what we want to do. We are acting on those plans.
This year, the theme of World Environment Week has a clear message that it is time to act and clean up our country to create a better life. Our country is getting dirtier every day and our people's lives are endangered. Our environment is degraded by ill-managed and hazardous waste, and our children are in constant danger of contracting diseases. Because of air pollution, as a world, we are faced with the real possibility of global warming and similar dangers emanating from atmospheric changes, and our enormous coastline is threatened by irresponsible human behaviour. We have resolved to get a foothold on all these issues through clear policies and firm action in order to entrench the principles of sustainable development geared towards the improvement of our people's quality of life.
To do this, an integrated strategy is indispensable. A forum such as the NCOP, that brings all the spheres of government together, is tasked with a role that can make or break our endeavours to carry this vision forward. If provinces and local governments do not localise and implement these policies that we have set out here, those policies remain meaningless to the poor majority we purport to serve.
Pollution and waste management issues are foremost on our agenda. Just two weeks ago, we unveiled the White Paper on Integrated Pollution and Waste Management for SA. We are determined to turn this policy into reality. To this end, we have published, for public comment, regulations that spell out our intention to ban the use of plastic carrier bags. Let me hasten to say that the ban is not on all plastics, but we will only ban the thin carrier bags that have 79 microns or less that are given free of charge in all the supermarkets, and that are always visible in our country's landscape. Everyone uses plastic, and therefore we strongly believe that this issue will help us reach every South African and encourage a culture of cleanliness.
Visible action is being taken to establish waste management infrastructure in townships dealing with medical waste - this is what was raised by the hon member from the North West who was worried about medical waste. We had a lot of incidents even in the Western Cape and all over the country, and we need to deal with it, and other hazardous waste which continues to threaten our communities and is contributing to increased poverty and the degradation of the environment.
To this end, in August this year, we will be publishing guidelines for integrated waste management planning for local government. Local government has a key role to play in the community awareness campaigns, the designing of alternative collection systems and the creation of community-based waste collection systems.
It is the role of local government to put in place local by-laws, ordinances and regulations that are effective. It is appropriate to acknowledge the steps taken by the Northern Cape town of Douglas, as has already been mentioned, of banning plastic carrier bags well ahead of this becoming law. Last weekend some shops in Pretoria also announced to their customers and to the communities that, as from next month, they would not be using any plastic bags; people must bring their own carrier bags. We are proud of these initiatives. The city of Cape Town will also soon be launching a huge campaign against litter in the Mother City. This is the type of initiative we expect from local government if we are to succeed in defeating the scourge of waste that threatens to drown us all.
The state of health care waste management in South Africa is very poor. Contributing to this state of affairs is a lack of training and awareness, and limited financial resources, particularly at the provincial health care level. Add to this the lack of capacity at authority level, and one has a situation where the disposal of health care waste to inappropriate landfills and informal dumps becomes commonplace in our country.
Whilst some institutions are managing infectious waste in an unacceptable manner, almost none has acceptable procedures and management systems in place for chemical, including pharmaceutical, waste and low-level radioactive waste. A brief study into the current status of health care waste management, the approach used internationally and the needs in South Africa has been conducted by our department. We will shortly be publishing regulations that will serve as guidelines for health care waste management to correct this scary situation.
Over the past few months, concern has been expressed about air pollution. Some corporate citizens have been less than responsible in their commitment to limit emission levels to acceptable and hazard-free levels.
Government, on its side, has been consistent over the past six years in enforcing sustained emission reduction programmes at each of the four refineries in our country. We are confident that this will result in significant improvement in ambient air pollution levels in the vicinity of these plants. In fact, the results of our independently audited monitoring reveals that the emission levels which residents are exposed to are well below the standards of the World Health Organisation. However, we are still concerned that these levels have not yet been reached everywhere, because communities are still suffering in these areas. We are determined to continue monitoring this.
The hon member Mr Van Niekerk is indeed correct in saying that littering is a crime. In fact, people in some areas have already implemented certain initiatives. The other day I launched a buy-back centre in Thohoyandou. There the youth have volunteered to enforce this. They wore T-shirts with the words ``littering is a crime''. There are initiatives that we do not know about. We encourage people to go on with this. Littering really is a crime.
Despite these improvements, Government is committed to heed the calls of our people who have, over the years, moved closer to sites near refineries and in some instances, of course, the refineries were built near them. We have stated, on a number of occasions, that we have no tolerance for companies that harm the health of residents and workers through their activities. We will not hesitate to prosecute and recover damages from companies that disregard environmental norms and standards.
We have agreed to start negotiations with the refineries on putting in place co-operative agreements in terms of the National Environmental Management Act, which will entail the operation of ambient and emission monitoring, independent auditing of monitoring results and agreeing on emission reduction programmes. These negotiations do not preclude more drastic action against the major pollutors in this country, we will still prosecute them. Polluters will be made to pay to clean up their mess. They will have to pay for all the expenses incurred by the communities.