Insight & Article Archive

Date: 30 & 31 March 2026

Focus & Themes: This event will highlight Africa’s leadership in advancing circular economy practices and environmental resilience.

Quinton Williams

January, 2026

South Africa’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) system was designed to shift accountability identified products (waste) away from municipalities and onto producers.

In theory, municipalities are not solely responsible for waste management, particularly for identified products. Producer Responsibility Organisations (PROs), funded by EPR fees, should step in to recover material, assist in integrating waste pickers and invest into circular economic initiatives. Although mandated EPR has been implementation for four years, alignment of responsibility is not that clear. When you put your bin out, whose responsibility is it really, the municipality or the company that made the product.

The answer lies in understanding the overlapping legal mandates of municipalities and PROs, the performance of waste services, and the financial realities that underpin both systems. This overlap of constitutional duty and industry obligation results in the unclarity, and where risks and opportunities for South Africa’s EPR is quite visible.

Previous articles in this series examined the complexity of the EPR regulatory framework, fee-setting challenges, and the need for national collaboration. This article addresses a more fundamental question: where does the producer’s responsibility end, and where does the municipality’s begin?

The Municipal Mandate: A Constitutional Duty

South Africa’s Constitution and the National Environmental Management: Waste Act (NEM:WA) are quite clear, municipalities are the local Waste Management Authorities. They carry the primary responsibility for household waste collection and disposal.

The EPR Regulations (Section 5A) require PROs to “co-operate” with municipalities. However, this does not change the constitutional position, it does not transfer municipal powers or obligations to industry. Municipalities remain bound by the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA), the Municipal Systems Act, and Supply Chain Management (SCM) regulations. They cannot spend money outside approved budgets, nor can they accept services or funding outside constitutionally compliant procurement processes under Section 217.

South Africa’s EPR framework allows multiple PROs and competing schemes, each seeking to demonstrate municipal collaboration. Yet municipal engagement is not straightforward. If a PRO offers to fund or deliver a service, municipalities cannot simply accept. Donations, unsolicited bids, or service offers must go through supply chain management processes, council approvals, and in some cases, Treasury oversight.

Even where assets are donated, municipalities must budget for operations and maintenance. Failure to do so risks creating unfunded mandates and irregular expenditure. Regardless of who pays, municipalities are legally required to retain control of waste services.

A municipality also cannot outsource their constitutional duty. They may enter partnerships or contracts, but accountability to provide waste services to citizens remains with the municipality. Thus, services and/or infrastructure provided will/may become the responsibility of the municipality which they would need to account for.

The PRO Mandate: Industry’s Obligation

PROs exist to fulfil the obligations placed on producers by the EPR Regulations under Section 18 of NEM:WA. Their mandate is also clear, manage the end-of-life of their members’ products, ensure collection and recycling targets are met, integrate and compensate waste pickers, and fund education, awareness, and transformation initiatives.

Regulation 5A requires PROs to co-operate with municipalities to increase the recovery of identified products from municipal waste. Municipal waste management services, particularly household collection, is the basis of post-consumer waste management. PROs are therefore expected to support municipal systems and not only operate independently of them.

PROs need to meet their industry’s EPR obligations, but this also requires them working through municipal structures that are often overburdened, under-capacitated, or resistant to external interventions.

The Clash: Where Mandates Collide

The initial points of this article paves a path toward collision, as mandates overlap and expectation may differ.

The Legal Risk of ‘No-Cost’ Service Delivery

A PRO might propose to fund recycling collection service in a municipality. This is a straightforward way for the PRO to meet targets (collection and co-operating with a municipality). However, to the municipality, this is an unsolicited bid, a donation, or potentially an irregular contract. Without the proper approvals, accepting the service/funding risks breaching the MFMA. What may look like ‘free help’ can become legal non-compliance for the municipality.

Service Supplementation versus Mandate Substitution

A PRO might want to implement services that initially enhances municipal services, but it may become the only separation-at-source service when there is a lack of municipal collection, ultimately taking over the municipal obligation.

Legally, PROs cannot displace municipalities. They can co-fund new services, pilots, or infrastructure, but they cannot simply take over household waste collection or replace service without formal service delivery agreements. These agreements must go through competitive processes, with all the delays and bureaucracy that entails.

The Legal Limits of MOUs in Municipal Service Delivery

Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) has become the norm for PROs to demonstrate co-operation with municipalities. But MOUs are not contracts and they cannot bypass procurement rules. They are useful tools for signalling intent, but they must evolve into properly structured agreements if they are to support service delivery.

This is where the system stalls. PROs want to move quickly to meet regulatory targets. Municipalities must move cautiously to comply with governance requirements. The result is frustration on both sides, and often, inaction.

Municipal Performance: The Service Delivery Gap

Many municipalities struggle to deliver consistent waste collection. The draft 2026 National Waste Management Strategy reports a national average collection coverage of 63.6%.

Without functioning municipal collection, identified products (largely plastics) does not reliably enter formal recycling streams. The temptation is to let PROs ‘fill the gaps’. But this leads to the question, is it industry’s job to save municipalities?

Budgets: The Financial Scale of the Challenge

Comparing municipal and PRO budgets helps to answer this question.

Municipal waste management operates at a scale of billions of rand annually. The table below illustrates the operational and capital expenditure of three metros, as per their recent Medium Term Revenue and Expenditure Framework.

These budgets fund daily collection, fleet operations, landfill management, and illegal dumping response. Revenue from service charges rarely covers full costs, requiring cross-subsidisation through property rates and national grants.

By contrast, PRO funding operates in the hundreds of millions and is targeted to specific material streams, in 2024:

Polyco (Plastics): Invested R180 Million TGRC (Glass): Invested R 20 Million MetPac-SA (Metal): Invested R 8 Million Petco (PET/LBP): Invested R 70 Million

PRO funds are significant, but they cannot replace municipal systems. They are designed to unlock recycling outcomes, not fund universal service delivery.

Separation at Source: Who Pays?

One of the most critical areas of overlap is Separation at Source (S@S). Implementing S@S requires both capital and operating expenditure. Large Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) (100,000 tonnes per annum) can cost between R 850 million and R 1,16 billion to construct, with ongoing costs for staffing, transport, education and management.

Legally, municipalities must budget for service delivery. PROs can and should co-fund pilots, equipment, and citizen engagement, but unless municipal budgets absorb the operational expenditure, S@S schemes risk collapsing once donor or PRO funding ends. Donations that create ongoing obligations must be recognised in municipal budgets. Failure to do so risks creating unfunded mandates and irregular expenditure.

Without clear cost allocation, S@S remains structurally fragile.

Waste pickers: bridging the formal-informal divide

Waste pickers further complicate the question of responsibility. They operate largely outside formal municipal systems, yet they deliver demonstrable recycling outcomes that directly benefit producers. EPR Regulations explicitly require waste picker integration and compensation, but they do not displace municipal authority over public space, landfills, or service delivery.

This creates a shared obligation. Municipalities should enable access and recognition, whereas PROs should co-fund integration and assist with fair compensation. Attempts by either party to act alone tend to result in misalignment and potential duplication, or failure. Sustainable integration requires aligned roles and funding flows.

The Risk of Parallel Systems and Diluted Accountability

The greatest risk is the emergence of parallel waste systems, municipal services operating on one track, PRO-funded projects operating on another, and waste pickers navigating between the two. This fragments accountability, duplicates costs, and weakens oversight.

EPR was intended to strengthen the public waste system, not bypass it. When PROs are expected, explicitly or implicitly, to ‘fix’ municipal failures, EPR funding is diverted from system development into crisis management. That is not only inefficient, but also my belief that it is contrary to the intent of the Regulations.

Towards a Shared Responsibility Framework

So, whose responsibility is it? It is not either/or. Unless legislation changes, municipalities retain constitutional duty and the PROs carry industry’s obligations. The challenge is to align these responsibilities without duplication, conflict, or legal risk.

Clarify roles

Municipalities remain responsible for the provision, oversight, and accountability of waste services to households. This includes collection standards, contractor management, service coverage, and compliance with municipal legislation.

PROs, on the other hand, are responsible for achieving material-specific recovery and recycling outcomes, funded through EPR fees. Their role is to enable recycling performance within municipal systems, not to replace those systems. Support that drifts into substitution weakens municipal accountability and exposes both parties to legal risk.

Create legally safe pathways

MOUs are useful signals of intent, but they do not authorise implementation. What is required is a national engagement framework that recognises municipal governance realities.

This should include standardised project typologies (e.g. pilots, infrastructure co-funding, service enhancement, waste picker integration), clear approval pathways, and guidance on when SCM processes are triggered. Without this, every engagement becomes a bespoke legal exercise, slowing delivery and encouraging risk-averse behaviour.

Align funding flows

Municipal waste services are funded primarily through rates, service charges, and intergovernmental funds. EPR fees are designed to fund recycling outcomes, not universal service delivery.

A shared framework must therefore distinguish between baseline service costs and recycling improvement costs. Where PRO funding overlaps with municipal expenditure, there must be transparency to avoid double payment, hidden cross-subsidisation, or inflated expectations of what EPR can realistically finance.

S@S co-design

S@S cannot succeed as an externally funded add-on. Municipalities must budget for the baseline collection service, while PROs fund the incremental costs that deliver higher-quality recyclable material, e.g. additional containers, sorting infrastructure, education, and contamination management. Co-designing S@S initiatives forces explicit cost attribution and long-term planning, reducing the risk of pilot projects that collapse once EPR funding cycles end.

Conclusion: Responsibility, Accountability, and System Coherence

When a household puts its bin on the pavement, responsibility for collection remains with the municipality. That duty is constitutional and non-transferable.

When that bin contains identified products, responsibility does not end at collection. Producers, through PROs, are legally obliged to ensure recovery, recycling, and fair compensation of those who enable it.

The question, therefore, is not whether waste is a municipal responsibility or a producer responsibility. It is both, but at different points in the system, under different legal mandates, and funded through different mechanisms.

The failure of South Africa’s EPR system will not stem from a lack of policy or funding, but from unresolved ambiguity over roles, blurred accountability, and the expectation that one actor can compensate for the failures of another. EPR will only succeed if municipalities retain ownership of service delivery, PROs focus on funding recycling outcomes, and both operate within a legally coherent framework.

Shared responsibility does not mean shared ambiguity. It requires discipline, sequencing, and explicit trade-offs. Where roles are clear, funding is aligned, and collaboration is legally defensible, EPR can strengthen municipal waste systems rather than compete with them.