Why Recycling Matters: South Africa's Waste Crisis in Numbers

South Africa generates an estimated 122 million tonnes of waste every year — and recycles only around 10% of it. The other 90% ends up in landfills and illegal dumpsites, according to Statistics South Africa. For a country with limited landfill capacity and growing urban populations, that gap matters more every year.

The numbers behind the problem

Household participation in recycling is still low nationally. Only about 12.9% of metropolitan households report recycling their waste, though this varies significantly by province — the Western Cape leads at 20.3%, with Gauteng close behind at 12.7%. Around 64% of South African households have access to formal waste management services at all, which means a large share of the population has few good options for keeping recyclables out of landfill in the first place.

Where South Africa is doing well

It's not all bad news. Paper recycling has been a genuine success story: the paper recycling rate climbed to 63.3% in 2025, up from 60% the year before, diverting roughly 1.2 million tonnes of paper and packaging from landfill annually. Over the past decade, more than 13 million tonnes of paper and paper packaging have been recovered for recycling countrywide.

Metal recycling is another strong performer. South Africa recycles an estimated 2.5–3 million tonnes of scrap metal each year, a sector the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition says contributes billions of rands to the economy and supports thousands of jobs. Plastic recycling is climbing too, with around 519,400 tonnes recycled recently — a 46.3% input recycling rate for plastics.

What recycling actually saves

Recycling paper and cardboard alone has saved South Africa nearly 40 million cubic metres of landfill space, while also feeding raw material back into packaging and tissue manufacturing. Beyond landfill space, recycling reduces pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and the recycling process for paper uses significantly less energy than producing new pulp from raw timber.

What you can do

You don't need to solve South Africa's waste crisis on your own — but separating recyclables (paper, cardboard, scrap metal) from general household or building waste, and using a collection service that actually routes materials to recycling rather than straight to landfill, makes a real difference at scale.

That's the gap we try to close at J&S Transport. When we collect your newspapers, white paper, boxes or scrap metal, we route it toward recycling wherever possible — and for scrap metal, we can issue a Certificate of Destruction confirming exactly what happened to it.

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