South Africa’s draft National Waste Management Strategy will eventually be the blueprint to achieve the National Development Plan’s Vision 2030 to become a zero-waste-to-landfill society. Public comment on the strategy closed in April this year, but the Strategy itself has not yet been finalised.
The document acknowledges a sharp regression over the past five years:
- landfill diversion has decreased from roughly 35% in 2018 to about 10% now,
- total waste generated has grown from around 107 to 122 million tonnes, and
- an estimated 3.67 million tonnes of municipal waste goes uncollected annually.
Energy recovery at South African landfills
A GreenCape Waste-to-Energy Industry brief points out that South Africa has one landfill gas extraction and two biomass projects listed with the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers Procurement Programme.
- The 25MW Ngodwana Energy Biomass Project came on stream in March 2022, using biomass recovered from plantations and screened waste materials from the mill production process. Up to 35 tonnes per hour of biomass is burned in a boiler to generate steam and drive a turbine to generate electricity fed into the national grid.
- The 16.5MW Mkuze Biomass Project in KwaZulu-Natal uses agricultural by-products and sugarcane waste (tops and trash).
- The 18MW Joburg Landfill Gas to Electricity Project extracts methane-rich landfill gas across municipal landfill sites in Johannesburg such as Robinson Deep and Goudkoppies to generate electricity.
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Then there’s also
- The KZN projects: 6.5MW Bisasar Road landfill gas-to-electricity project was commissioned in 2008 and is grid-tied to eThekwini’s electricity department at the megaflex tariff. The Marianhill 1MW project was commissioned in 2006, along the same grid arrangement.
- Operational since November 2025, the Coastal Park Landfill Gas Plant converts gas from waste into enough electricity to power over 4,300 homes. It generates 1.3 million kWh of electricity a month, which is fed into the Cape Town grid.
- Launched in 2017 (by IDC, Clean Energy, WasteMart, Afrox and other partners), the New Horizons waste-to-energy plant in Athlone, manages about 10% of the municipal solid waste produced in Cape Town through anaerobic digestion, recycling and converting it into various products, including organic fertiliser, liquid carbon dioxide (CO2) and compressed biomethane.
On the horizon
- The Infrastructure Fund (blended platform created by DBSA, National Treasury and Infrastructure SA) has secured a R550 million grant from Invest International to support the implementation of the City of Johannesburg’s Alternative Waste Treatment Technology (AWTT) Project. The project will comprise a Dirty Materials Recovery Facility and a Waste-to-Energy Project to generate ~28MW of electricity.
- City of Tshwane Alternative Waste Treatment Technology Programme is to divert waste from landfill while supporting RE generation. At feasibility stage, the programme will combine waste-to-energy, integrated waste management facilities and sludge treatment solutions. Also an Infrastructure SA initiative.
- The Vissershok landfill near Koeberg in Cape Town gas-to-electricity project is still at the flaring/carbon credit stage with the gas-engine conversion still in the pipeline but the plan is to build a 2MW plant and scale up to 7-9MW, depending on gas yields, with roughly R197 million earmarked for the generation conversion on top of R86.4 million for well-field O&M.
Landfill waste-to-energy projects elsewhere in Africa
When it comes to landfill waste-to-energy projects across the continent, there is real technical interest in the form of feasibility studies, tenders in Egypt, Tunisia, Nigeria, Uganda and even a carbon-credit-funded gas capture in Morocco, but not a single commissioned case of captured landfill methane being converted to electricity at scale outside South Africa.
Inside South Africa, the National Waste Management Strategy is meant to address the stagnation of waste diversion from landfills, reinforcing that the country is meant to ramp up to a 40% diversion from landfill within the next five years and then scale up to 70% of diversion within 15 years.
Extended Producer Responsibility is positioned in the National Waste Management Strategy as the engine to achieve this, but the reality is that South African municipalities are struggling with basic waste collection and education around landfill diversion is not impinging on the lifestyle of most people, so the landfills are going to keep on filling up.
Landfill diversion may be the eventual goal but in the meantime South Africa is going to have to expand its waste-to-energy efforts to at least partially deal with the waste that already exists and is only going to grow in the foreseeable future.
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