Volunteers Helped Detect Illegal Scrap Tire Dumps in South Africa

The Recycling and Economic Development Initiative of South Africa (REDISA) (www.redisa.org.za) is a non-profit, public benefit organization which pioneered a new approach to Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and applied it to the scrap tire problem. South Africa generates about 12 million scrap tires annually, with very little recycling or recovery happening, thereby creating a massive environmental problem. REDISA established a national program in 2013 for managing the scrap tires, involving a reverse logistics network to collect scrap tires from dealers, aggregate them, and supply them to recyclers and kilns. By early-2017, REDISA was servicing >95% of scrap tire collection requests. For various reasons, the program was stopped in mid-2017.  Now official sites for scrap tires are overflowing, and there is good reason to believe that illegal dumping is happening on a large scale.

In anticipation of resuming their recycling program, REDISA requested volunteer help from GISCorps to detect locations of illegal scrap tire dumps using remote sensing. GISCorps chose Beni Patel, from Texas, and Indu Hulisandra, from California.  The project consisted of two phases.  In the first phase, Beni and Indu conducted a needs assessment to determine if the project was technically feasible given the available imagery.  The second phase consisted of analyzing the available imagery to determine the locations of any illegal scrap tire dumps and providing those locations to REDISA for ground verification.

This project is complete.