South Africa’s extended producer responsibility framework is getting a visual audit of sorts. A new six-part documentary series, ‘Stepping into the Circular Economy’, sets out to show how the policy regime governing waste and recycling actually operates along the value chain. It is produced by Cape Town-based sustainability communications agency The Sustainability Communication Company (Susco) in partnership with the EPR Waste Association of South Africa (eWASA), the producer responsibility organisation at the centre of the country’s waste compliance landscape.
The timing matters. Obligations placed on producers, and the systems meant to collect, separate and reprocess discarded materials, depend on coordination across a wide set of actors. According to the brief accompanying the launch, the documentary follows recovered materials from product design and waste separation through to recycling and enterprise development, combining industry perspectives with the practical experiences of those involved in recovering and processing waste.
“Producer responsibility only works when every part of the chain is visible and connected,” says eWASA circular economy specialist Lerato Mphahlele. “This series shows that connection. It follows producer responsibilities through to the recyclers and enterprises that turn recovered material into something with value.”
That framing places the regulatory instrument itself, extended producer responsibility, at the heart of the narrative. The first episode, available on Susco’s YouTube channel, examines three areas that influence the effectiveness of the circular economy: designing products for recyclability, separating waste at source to prevent contamination, and implementing EPR to support waste collection, recycling and enterprise development. Product design sits upstream of the entire compliance chain. Decisions made before a product reaches the market determine whether it can be recovered at all.
Meanwhile, subsequent episodes will turn to the wider cast of participants on whom the system relies, featuring waste reclaimers, buyback centres, small-scale recyclers, entrepreneurs, waste management companies and the government departments involved in the waste value chain. The inclusion of government departments alongside private and informal-sector operators underscores the point that landfill diversion is not achieved by regulation alone, but by the layered execution of mandates across the chain.
Mphahlele argues that the series aims to demonstrate the value of waste by showing how materials move through the value chain. “The circular economy is easy to talk about and sometimes hard to picture,” she says. “A strong visual story that follows the materials through the value chain will help shift the perspective towards waste, as something that holds value.”
Susco director Chris Bischoff describes the project in similar terms, noting that the series follows waste material through the full value chain and aims to show the work of the people who drive each stage of the circular economy.
The closing argument of the series carries policy weight of its own. Mphahlele concludes that improving landfill diversion and returning more materials to the economy will require greater consideration of product design, investment in waste-separation infrastructure and accelerated adoption of EPR. Each of those levers implicates a different set of decision-makers: producers responsible for what they put on the market, municipalities and private operators responsible for separation infrastructure, and the regulators and producer responsibility organisations responsible for driving adoption of the EPR framework.
For an audience tracking how South Africa’s waste policy is translated into practice, the series offers a document of the system as it currently functions, from the design brief to the buyback centre. Further detail on the documentary and its rollout is available via the original report at https://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/documentary-series-explores-south-africas-circular-economy-2026-10-12, which notes the series’ aim of highlighting the role of industry and waste-sector participants in advancing the circular economy. Whether the remaining episodes sharpen the accountability questions around who executes which mandate, and how well, remains to be seen.