The City of Johannesburg is considering waste-to-power projects to generate electricity, particularly in times of load-shedding.
Environment and Infrastructures Services deputy director Mvuselelo Mathebula mentions in a press statement that key projects have been lined up to divert waste from landfill sites by recycling and using it to generate electricity.
He says the city’s landfill gas-to-power project is already extracting methane gas from four of Johannesburg’s landfill sites and generating electricity for the national grid at the Robinson landfill site.
The city plans to divert at least a third of its total waste, to generate between 30 MW and 40 MW of electricity. To this end, transaction advisory services were already appointed to review a feasibility study in 2015, and will now help take the project to financial closure.
Another waste-to-power project has entered the construction phase and will convert biomass from the Joburg Fresh Produce Market and food waste from restaurants to energy. Some of the gas will be shared with Metrobus for its gas-powered fleet and the balance will be used to generate electricity.
Mathebula confirms that the city is also working on strategies to integrate waste pickers into the formal waste sector by developing sorting sites for them in all regions of the city, which will hopefully eradicate the proliferation of illegal sorting sites that are prevalent in the city.