Every week, South African households throw away tonnes of organic waste. Most of it ends up in landfills, where it rots. Lumped with other stuff that people throw out, like packaging, it smoulders, leaches and releases methane at dangerous levels. The waste sector contributes 20% of human-caused methane pollution. Of that, food waste is a major contributor. It adds up to 14% of global methane emissions alone.
Yet nationally, only about 10% of waste is diverted from landfills. Provincially, the Western Cape is trying to do better, setting a target to ban all organic waste from landfills by 2027, with a halfway target of 50% that was set for 2022. But that target was missed. Municipalities were supposed to set baseline measurements as far back as 2018. Most never did.
With the Western Cape’s 2027 deadline looming, and large-scale infrastructure still catching up, small social enterprises like Gooi have stepped in to fill the gap.
In Cape Town, Gooi uses a subscription-based pay model: each household in their network gets a bucket for waste, a compostable trash bag, and a slot in a dedicated weekly pick-up route. Each week, a bakkie rolls around to collect the bags of kitchen scraps, and each household gets a new bag to fill.
Gooi is currently operating at a boutique scale. One driver, one bakkie and a handful of neighbourhoods. A single driver running five days a week can service 200 to 250 households at full capacity. Nevertheless, since 2023, Gooi has diverted nearly 19 726 kg of organic waste away from landfills.
The food waste, separated at homes, is then delivered to partner sites that turn it into compost. Gooi’s partner sites — including Neighbourhood Farm in Fish Hoek, Soil for Life in Constantia and Streetscapes in Gardens and District Six — receive weekly deliveries of the raw material that is to become what they call “black gold” — rich, biologically alive soil amendment that is packed with the micro-organisms that make food systems work. Composting requires the right balance of green and brown material, moisture and aeration, turning and timing. Left to its own devices, organic matter decomposes anyway, but composting simply manages that process deliberately, creating conditions that accelerate decomposition and produce something useful.
The compost is used in food gardens, and those gardens feed people while creating jobs. Many community food gardens locally struggle to afford the compost that would let them grow more food. The problem and the solution to growing food were sitting in the same bin.
Globally, municipalities are investing in composting facilities because the work can’t be easily automated. This matters more than it may seem. Currently, South Africa is a net importer of fertiliser, much of it fossil-fuel derived. Every bag of compost produced locally from waste helps to reduce the chemical dependency that modern agriculture has built up over decades. If we don’t look after the soil, the food system collapses.
The barrier to entry for households is almost nothing. Separating food scraps doesn’t take much time or effort. The dignity dividend is also significant: waste reclaimers sorting through dirty, mixed waste face worse conditions and lower yields when organic waste material has compromised the load. Clean separation at source makes the whole waste economy work better.
