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Every breath we take: Counting the cost of noxious air pollution in the Vaal Triangle

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Nhlanhla Sibisi is the climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Africa.

Flying in the face of international best practice, the government has weakened rather than strengthened sulphur dioxide standards for the Highveld Priority Area. One of the reasons is Eskom and Sasol’s inability to meet them because of ‘high costs’. People’s health is secondary to the energy sector’s bottom line.

The town of Secunda and its neighbouring township of Embalenhle are in the government’s designated Highveld Priority Area (HPA) in Mpumalanga. The HPA was declared by the then minister of environmental affairs and tourism on 23 November 2007. As the area overlaps provincial boundaries, the now Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries (DEFF) functions as the lead agent in developing an Air Quality Management Plan (AQMP) for the HPA.

These terms belie the terrible quality of the air in the area, thanks to operations by Eskom’s concentration of coal-fired power stations in the province and Sasol’s synfuel plant. According to studies and reports released by environmental organisations such as groundWork and Greenpeace Africa in 2018 and 2019, the area falls within the country’s sulphur dioxide (SO2) hotspot – the worst on the continent and fourth-worst globally.

How low can the ministry go?

Section 24 of the Bill of Rights, in the South African Constitution, guarantees all of us the right to clean air — or at least air that is not harmful to people and the environment. However, various scientific reports continuously show that our air quality is nothing close to the various legislated standards set for the country.

On the other hand, Minister of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries Barbara Creecy has weakened the standards further, as is the case with SO2; the limits were weakened from 500mg per normal cubic metre (mg/Nm3) to 1,000mg/Nm3, coming into effect on 1 April 2020.

Soon after, Greenpeace Africa officially challenged the minister, seeking an explanation on the weakening of the country’s SO2 standards. The request for clarity — sent in April 2020 — finally received a response only in July 2020. It was with dismay that we learnt that one of the reasons for weakening the SO2 standards is due to Eskom and Sasol’s inability to meet them because of associated “high costs”. People’s health is secondary, if at all, to the energy sector’s bottom line.

By gazetting the weakened SO2 standards, Creecy sided with the two biggest environmental polluters in the country by simply handing them the licence to pollute, and as a consequence, the licence to kill. DEFF literally aligned itself with the country’s fossil criminals and placed profit over people’s right to healthy and clean air.

The raw deal produced by Sasol in Secunda

Sasol’s synfuels operations plant, nestled between Secunda town and Embalenhle township, draws its workforce from both settlements and others close by. The Secunda synfuels operation receives coal from five mines in Mpumalanga which, used by Sasol, is converted to synthetic fuel — and related fossil fuel by-products — using steam and gas. The coal is also gasified at temperatures of up to 1,300°C, at times more.

Sasol also has a supply chain of industries in the Secunda area that supply and use products from Sasol, entrenching coal dependence and the consequent health impacts in the area. The type of pollutants emanating from Sasol and other similar industries (including SO2 and nitrogen dioxide) pollute Secunda, Embalenhle and surrounding settlements, but the dispersion is carried even as far as Johannesburg and Pretoria in Gauteng.

The most vulnerable communities continue to bear the brunt of air pollution. Embalenhle township, in the Govan Mbeki District Municipality, is classified as a frontline community because the township is located in the pathway that carries fumes emanating from the Sasol plant. Easterly winds pushing through the Sasol plant carry emissions in the direction of Embalenhle, making residents vulnerable to respiratory and heart diseases caused by these pollutants.

Impact on human health

Businesses and governments automatically assume that the bottom line and contributing to GDP is the noble thing to do for our democracy. Within a democratic society, how can we assume negative health impacts are good for economic development? Unfortunately, it is the most vulnerable and the poor who pay the price with their lives. Without medical aid or adequate health facilities in and around Embalenhle, residents have to travel to neighbouring towns to seek healthcare once they have developed respiratory diseases such as asthma or lung cancer.

Officials of the Gert Sibande Municipality claim they are fully staffed with health professionals to attend to the number of people in the area. Their requirement is to have at least 107 health practitioners per 10,000 people; instead, they stand at 29, a massive shortage of 78 health professionals. Not adequately funded to meet the needs of the community, at the local government authority-level, priority is shifted from saving lives. Community lives do not matter.

Civil society is constantly dismantling the fables of the polluting fossil fuel industry. The latter spews out the general rhetoric that coal is “good for our country because we have it in abundance” therefore “we should use it” and it will “give back to the community”. While prioritising the country’s economy, the only real kickbacks for these communities are pollution and poor health. Fossil fuel’s favourite story to tell is that it’s worth it.

Evidence is scientific and real 

The South African Air Quality Information System (SAAQIS) collects all of the monitoring station information collected by different suppliers. In Mpumalanga, some municipalities in Mpumalanga, Eskom, and DEFF all have their own monitoring stations in different locations, including Sasol in Embalenhle township.

Even though these monitoring stations collate real-time data, they are not always operational. This becomes a notable — and quite disturbing — obstacle for collecting evidence, ultimately becoming a disadvantage to sound scientific data collection. When a monitoring station is not operational, for whatever reason, it defeats the purpose of collecting ongoing seamless data. Why would that be? Eskom and Sasol, for example, have previously claimed that their monitoring stations have not worked because of “electrical failure”, “rebooting of the system” and “system malfunction”, to name but a few.

It’s hard not to see this as a deliberate effort to conceal the actual readings of data that would show non-compliance with the Minimum Emission Standards. Standards have to be cumulatively maintained daily, monthly and annually to prove that a given operation is not exceeding set limits of ambient air pollution in any given area. On the other hand, we have a situation where monitoring stations collect data on several different kinds of pollutants, but not all monitoring stations are consistently recording all pollutants — another failure to ensure that standards are properly accounted for and recorded as per the requirements of South Africa’s set standards, which ultimately enables big polluters to dodge accountability through missing data.

Greenpeace Africa conducted a fact-finding trip on 14 April 2019 to the Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA) Secunda official monitor, at Embalenhle township. The official DEA monitoring station at this location was showing measurements between 800-1,000 ug/m3 for PM10 over the past few days. However, our pDR showed PM10 measurements at this location in Kriel were consistently between 30-40 ug/m3. These measurements are within South African hourly limits for PM10 (75ug/m3). This proved that the DEA monitoring station is most likely malfunctioning.

With the ailments suffered by these communities in and around Secunda, such as asthma, tuberculosis, respiratory issues and heart failure, the majority of those affected are young children, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems (resulting from opportunistic diseases including tuberculosis and HIV/Aids). Healthcare centre officials in and around Embalenhle concur.

Various structures at different government department levels carry the responsibility of ensuring implementation and compliance when it comes to pollution regulation. These regulated responsibilities can be done via the local, provincial or national government levels managed by the respective departmental authorities. However, they are directly linked.

All government structures from local to national must take action and play their respective roles when it comes to combating air pollution and enforcing air quality standards in South Africa. This should happen without failure or we will continue to lose lives and experience degradation of our environment, including the land, crops and animals. Community lives matter; so does the preservation of the environment that sustains us all. Businesses cannot be given carte blanche to continue polluting just because cost is weighted more heavily than human life. DM

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