The Plattekloof Village Shopping Centre has been showered with praise over its waste management efforts which have seen it recycle significant volumes of the waste generated on its premises.

Plattekloof Village has joined forces with Don’t Waste Services since November 2006 in a bid to minimize waste and reduce its impact on the environment. The move has seen the Centre divert 29,218 kg’s of waste from landfill in the last six month period alone! (560 000 Lt by volume)

“This is a huge feat considering the mix of different restaurants and tenants at Plattekloof Village Shopping Centre” said Mark Smuts, Regional General Manager W/C of Don’t Waste Services.”

Trained staff, employed from the local community, is placed on site and are in charge of sorting and separating the waste generated at the mall.

“We deal with up to 37 different grades of recyclable material, so the staff sorts anything from glass, a variety of paper grades, to many plastic grades, mixed beverage cans and so on.They do all of this on site and then they contact our national call.”

centre on a toll-free number to let them know how many bags of each of the grades they have.”  The call centre then dispatches pre-accredited and approved recycling agents who collect their designated grades of recyclable materials and ensure that it is put through the correct processes.  All transactions are tracked, logged and available for view on the Centre’s Web profile, with all data meticulously recorded as per legislated requirements.

Plattekloof Village is doing great things through this initiative and their recycling effort means that they are diverting a lot of waste that would otherwise have ended up in landfill. Centre Manager Renita Horn encourages Shoppers to separate their waste at home and drop off their recyclable materials (paper, plastic, metal and glass) in the orange bins, situated behind the Centre near the Brights yard. Bins are available between 8AM and 6PM.

Environmental Benefits achieved through the Site recycling performance

Major environmental benefits accrue through the process of waste minimisation and the recovery and recycling of waste materials.

Don’t Waste has developed systems that quantify and illustrate these benefits as they apply to a Customers actual and specific waste stream and the volumes and movements of the various grades of recoverable and non-recoverable materials.

Conversion factors are as per the EPA WARM (waste reduction) model and the US Dept of energy statistics.

The benefits below are the outcome of the conversion metrics applied directly to the Plattekloof Village waste data. Well done to Plattekloof Village on these significant environmental achievements!

Through recycling recoveries, based on the total lifecycle model for the materials involved, the total benefit to the environment for the last 12 months ending June 2013 is as follows: