Hierarchy of waste management strategies: Strategy selection for managing Johannesburg city’s restaurant food waste

The city of Johannesburg in South Africa generates a lot of restaurant food waste. This waste is currently diverted to landfills. The three (3) major landfills being used are fast running out of space as waste generation is increasing every day. The Municipality of Johannesburg city suffers limited land space to develop new landfills and such an exercise would also require huge sums of capital outlay. Globally, managing organic waste through landfilling has lost popularity as new and more sustainable strategies have now advanced to commercial scale. Some of these strategies include biomethanation, compositing and reuse of waste in resource recovery. Practitioners in waste management, rank strategies on “The Hierarchy of Waste Management” to reflect the sustainability attributes of each strategy or technology. Selecting the appropriate waste management technology for each situation depends on several sustainability factors such as available human skills, cost, environmental impacts as well as value of end products produced. This study seeks to choose a suitable technology from the hierarchy of waste management that can potentially replace landfilling for Johannesburg’s restaurant food wastes management. Literature published in South Africa’s Department of Higher and Tertiary Education (DHET) accredited journals and that sourced from existing and officially registered South African companies that participate in the waste management space shall be used in this study to arrive on conclusions.