SA has a litter crisis, but its dirty secret isn’t rubbish

The wind catches a greasy takeaway packet outside the Bree Street Taxi Rank in Johannesburg. It lifts for a second, dances above the pavement, then settles against a storm drain already clogged with plastic bottles, cigarette boxes and brown paper stained with oil. Thousands of people walk past it. Nobody bends down.

Not because they do not see it.

Because they no longer believe it belongs to them.

South Africa has a litter problem. Everyone knows it. Our highways are lined with plastic. Illegal dumping sites bloom beside roads, schools and streams. Minibus windows become exits for cooldrink cans. The scale is now measurable. A 2024 study of the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro, using aerial imagery to map every visible dumpsite across 1,331 square kilometres, found that the number of illegal dumpsites in the metro doubled between 2015 and 2021. Across Nelson Mandela Bay, civic decay has become visible from the air.

Yet the real crisis is not environmental. It is civic. And beneath the civic, it is political.

The visible symptom

Litter is one of the clearest physical indicators of a society’s relationship with itself. According to the UN Environment Programme, South Africa generates roughly 12.7 million tonnes of municipal waste each year, of which about 3.67 million tonnes never reach formal collection and end up dumped illegally. Stats SA’s General Household Survey shows formal refuse removal fell from 64.9% of households in 2016 to 58.8% in 2019, and dissatisfaction with municipal services has remained deeply entrenched since. Trust has eroded. And where trust erodes, ownership follows.

People stop asking: “What kind of country are we building together?” They begin asking: “Why should I care if nobody else does?” That shift is fatal for democracies.

Democracy brought political freedom, but freedom alone could not automatically rebuild a culture of shared stewardship.

There is a temptation, especially among middle-class commentators, to reach for poverty or education as the explanation. Field research suggests the picture is more complicated. Studies in Cape Town’s Fisantekraal, Komani in the Eastern Cape and informal settlements across the Western Cape consistently find that residents themselves identify non-collection and absent infrastructure as the primary drivers of dumping – not indifference. Where bins exist and trucks arrive, behaviour shifts. Where they do not, even households with strong civic instincts eventually give up.

But the inverse is also visible to anyone driving in South Africa. One can watch a luxury German sedan throw a McDonald’s bag from its window on the M1, kilometres from any service delivery failure, while a few suburbs away, gogos sweep dust from outside modest homes before sunrise. The behaviour is not reducible to infrastructure. There is something else moving underneath.

That something else is what I want to name.

Withdrawal

Democracy brought political freedom, but freedom alone could not automatically rebuild a culture of shared stewardship. Apartheid did not merely segregate geography; it also fractured patterns of communal ownership and long-term stewardship, displacing communities from the very spaces over which they would otherwise have inherited a sense of care. In many places, “public” slowly came to mean “government owned”, which in practice often means “owned by nobody”. When spaces belong to nobody, decay arrives quickly. Broken pavements. Overflowing drains. Burned rubbish heaps. Plastic tangled through fences like surrender flags.

The Human Sciences Research Council has documented for years a steady decline in institutional trust and a rising sense of civic frustration. Communities that stop believing institutions will protect or serve them eventually stop emotionally investing in the spaces those institutions govern. The pavement becomes someone else’s problem. The river becomes the municipality’s problem. The country becomes the politicians’ problem. The covenant – the daily, voluntary work by which a society holds itself together – quietly empties out.

Telling people they litter, that they are part of the decay, that responsibility is not only the municipality’s – that loses wards.

Urban research has repeatedly shown that visible disorder reproduces itself socially. Once litter accumulates, more litter follows. A clean environment silently says “people care here”. A dirty one whispers “nothing matters here”. South Africa must be careful what it keeps teaching itself every day.

Every piece of rubbish thrown into a public space is, in some sense, a declaration: “The space between us is not my responsibility.” But the covenant holds because people voluntarily care for spaces beyond their front doors. Functioning societies are held together by millions of invisible acts of restraint and stewardship – returning the trolley, waiting at a red robot, fixing the pothole outside your gate, picking up rubbish that is not yours.

Without those acts, freedom slowly deteriorates into entitlement, resentment and consumption.

The political problem nobody will name

Here is where the conversation usually stops – with a tidy moral about civic virtue. But there is a harder truth underneath it.

Civic norms do not float free of politics. They are reinforced, or eroded, by what political leaders are willing to say to the people who vote for them. In a competitive multiparty democracy, telling voters uncomfortable truths is electorally expensive. Telling people they litter, that they are part of the decay, that responsibility is not only the municipality’s – that loses wards. So politicians do not say it. They campaign on grievance and delivery, because grievance and delivery win votes.

A handful of parties do campaign on civic order, especially at metro level. But the civic covenant – the daily voluntary work of stewardship – has no political constituency strong enough to make it a national priority.

This is why comparisons to Rwanda, Singapore or Japan demand care rather than admiration. Rwanda’s monthly Umuganda clean-up programme works partly because the ruling party does not need to court voters in the same way every five years. The RPF can mandate participation, enforce it and frame it as national identity without losing the next election over it. Singapore sits in a similar zone. Clean streets and dominant-party rule are not a coincidence; the same political conditions that allow long-horizon norm enforcement also constrain dissent, press freedom and opposition space.

The point is not that authoritarianism produces social order. Many democracies maintain exceptionally strong civic cultures – Japan, the Nordics, parts of central Europe. The difference is that such cultures are usually inherited socially before they are enforced politically. Where the social inheritance is intact, democracy reinforces it. Where the social inheritance is broken, democracy alone struggles to repair it, because every politician has a structural incentive to flatter the voter rather than correct them. South Africa, rightly, chose the democratic side of that bargain. The cost is that civic recovery cannot be commanded from above. It has to be chosen, again and again, by people who are never thanked for it at the ballot box.

A country cannot vote its way to clean streets if no party can afford to ask the voter to carry a share of the responsibility.

There is a deeper messenger problem too. The parties most trusted in the communities where behaviour needs to change have built their brand on grievance against the state – which makes “you are also responsible” a politically incoherent sentence for them to deliver. Truth gets traded for votes not because individual politicians are uniquely venal, but because the incentive system rewards the trade.

What politics cannot fix

None of this absolves the state. Municipal collapse is real and consequential. Apartheid’s spatial planning placed Black communities furthest from services and is still doing so. Sanitation infrastructure is unequal by postcode. Some neighbourhoods receive collection three times a week; others wait a month and then are blamed for the consequences. The argument here is not that citizens have failed while the state has performed. Both have failed, and the failures compound each other.

But the reverse is also true: a country cannot vote its way to clean streets if no party can afford to ask the voter to carry a share of the responsibility.

If political leadership cannot deliver that message – and in the current configuration, it largely cannot – then civic recovery has to come from institutions that do not need to win an election six months later. Churches. Schools. Stokvels. Sports clubs. Neighbourhood associations. Traditional authorities. Workplaces. Father-presence initiatives and male mentorship programmes. The kind of institutions that can speak about responsibility, and model it, without being punished for it the next time voters go to the polls.

Whether those institutions still have the reach and moral authority to do this work is the genuine open question. Some clearly do. Many have been hollowed out by the same forces that hollowed out the municipalities. But they remain the most plausible vehicles for the slow work of rebuilding a norm that politicians cannot afford to defend.

Strong societies are sustained by strong norms. And strong norms, in a democracy, have to be carried by something other than the next campaign cycle.

South Africa cannot outsource national dignity entirely to municipalities already struggling to function, nor to political parties structurally incentivised to flatter rather than challenge. We will have to recover something deeper, and recover it from somewhere other than the ballot box: the belief that the space between us belongs to all of us.

Until then, the packet will keep blowing down the pavement outside Bree. Thousands will keep stepping around it. Not because they cannot see it – but because the country between them no longer feels like theirs. The rubbish will go on telling the truth about us long before the politicians do, because, in the end, the politicians are paid not to. DM