Wrestling with data: Establishing a national waste information baseline for South Africa

Abstract

Developing a waste information baseline for South Africa, without doing primary data collection, proved to be an enormous task. The project team had to ensure that all available data, whether being reported or not, were collected. This process involved contacting custodians of data and reports, meeting with relevant people and extracting data from a host of different sources. Sourcing waste data in South Africa proved to be a difficult task due to the relative unavailability of documents specifically IWMPs. The perseverance of the project team sourcing reports, reviewing close to 500 documents and furthermore making sense of the data collected, is noteworthy. A total number of 2 358 general waste data points and 810 hazardous waste data points spread over the period 1990 to 2011 were captured. This paper reports on some of the challenges experienced during the data collection and interpretation phase as well as the sources and quality of data collected.