Abstract

This article examines why mining-affected communities in the Gauteng City-Region appear to prioritize livelihoods over environmental wellbeing, and why this framing is itself a product of the exercise of power. While pollution is about land relations, generating evidence for its existence is political, and exposure to pollution is unevenly distributed. The article draws on contamination data and ethnographic interviews to describe how regulatory frameworks normalize pollution, forcing communities into false choices. It argues that choosing livelihoods over health is rational under conditions of economic scarcity, yet this choice obscures cumulative exposure to contamination and associated slow violence. Ordinary people’s responses to pollution and poverty are multifaceted: survivalist, thus harmful to some of them and their localities; and an exercise of resistance for others, demonstrating that when proper organizational and political conditions exist, communities can and do refuse the separation of economic and environmental justice. The discussion contributes to the political ecology concept by centering how uneven power relations produce not only pollution as acceptable but also ordinary people’s response options.

Keywords: Pollution, risk normalization, community responses, Gauteng-City Region.

1. Introduction  

The Gauteng City-Region is the heartland of South Africa’s economy, with mining having historically been themajor driver of its industrial and residential landscapes. While gold and to some extent coal and platinum-group-metals have variously been the bases of South Africa’s economic growth, the wealth they generate is unevenly distributed, with many people of colour, including mineworkers, struggling to survive. In addition, the mines are massive sources of pollution, with ordinary people in areas such as Blyvooruitzicht and Kroondaal living under conditions of contamination and facing complex choices about their livelihoods and their health.

A Blyvooruitzicht community leader told us: “we face death from hunger, not only from contamination.” This is not an expression of resignation but a rational response to joblessness, abandonment by public actors; an expression of being ignored by corporate obligations and the state’s failure to enforce environmental laws. The community leader’s sentiment is not simply about prioritizing livelihoods over health; it reflects the power relations that shape what communities can know about pollution and how they can act. Communities face what Bond (2021: 5) calls ‘toxic uncertainty’ and an engagement in an ‘everyday praxis of not noticing’, as contradictory messaging from authorities, lack of accessible and reliable information, and the long-standing minimization of risks by mining corporations and the state normalize contamination.

This article contributes to the concept of political ecology by reflecting on how uneven power relations produce both contaminated landscapes and constrained response possibilities. The idea of political ecology is sometimes seen as “hard to define” and to be “not a method or a theory, nor even a single perspective” (Robbins, 2012: 7; viii). In contrast, Swyngedouw and Heynen (2003) see political ecology as a ‘theoretical’ platform for interrogating the complex, interrelated socio-ecological processes that produce highly uneven socio-environmental conditions. In this article, we operationalize political ecology in two specific ways: First, we use political ecology as a framing device for reflecting on the inequitable distribution of social and economic power (Swyngedouw & Heynen, 2003). Second, we use it as an argument about what people do in response to toxicity and economic hardships. We also draw from contamination data and ethnographic interviews to describe how regulatory frameworks normalize pollution and force communities into false livelihoods/environment choice

The section that follows describes our research methods and case study areas. We then discuss the normalization of toxicity, how it is measured and the lack of enforcement of environmental laws. We argue that forms of quantification and regulation render toxicity mundane and acceptable. This is because toxicity and evidence-making for acceptable pollution limits are political – measuring helps decide what counts as harm (Hetch, 2023). Toxicity and its measurement are in part the outcomes of land colonialism and associated violence (Liboiron, 2021), embodying what Hecht (2018) and Peša (2022) call the African Anthropocene: toxicity is both a colonial-apartheid legacy and an ongoing neoliberal project. The ‘we’ who polluted the planet is not a universal ‘we’ – mining capital and the state enable pollution. The ‘we’ who lives with that pollution is racially and spatially specific.

Our discussion will foreground ordinary people’s lived experiences, exploring how they respond to their conditions of toxicity and impoverishment through strategies of resilience, reworking and resistance. While the Blyvooruitzicht community seems to frame economic livelihoods and environmental wellbeing in opposition to each other, organizations like the Ikemeleng Environment and Justice Organization connect environment and economy. Its actions make clean water, safe soils and decent livelihoods part of a single development claim. In this sense, the Gauteng City-Region region appears not as a case of apathy but as one of lived ingenuity amid legacies of unequal power and toxicity.

2. Description of case study areas and research methods

In December 2023, we collected water and soil samples in selected mining areas in the Gauteng City-Region and tested their toxicity levels. We sampled areas where platinum-group-metals (PGMs^[1]) are mined in Rustenburg, North-West province; where gold is mined in Blyvooruitzicht, Gauteng province; and where coal is mined in Secunda, Mpumalanga province (see Figure 1; the east-west band of tailings in red, running from Blyvooruitzicht to Secunda, is part of what came to be the Witwatersrand mining belt). We collected both water and soil samples in Rustenburg (in the settlements of Ikemeleng and Kanana) and Secunda. ^[2] In Blyvooruitzicht, we collected soil samples only, as its limited ground water sources are not generally used in people’s homes and gardens (see Figures 2 and 3[GW1] [NM2] ).

Figure 1: The case study areas in the Gauteng City-Region: Rustenburg, Blyvooruitzicht and Secunda

Figure 2: Blyvooruitzicht, city of Carletonville, and mining operations shown in yellow spots.   

Figure 3: Kroondaal/Ikemeleng and waste materials in the western platinum belt, and mining operations shown in yellow spots.    

Rustenburg is on the outer edges of the Bushveld Igneous Complex’s^[3] western limb, which holds the world’s largest reserves of PGMs. Although mining in this western limb is downscaling,^[4] it has already produced waste materials whose heavy metals contaminate water streams via seepage and surface runoff and pollute the atmosphere through heavy metal laden dust. Its southern part, where the immigrant communities of Kroondaal and Ikemeleng are located, features significant mining of chrome, with farming activities taking place nearby. This southern part is at the upper end of the Hex River (Figure 3 in blue), and the tributaries feed contaminated water from nearby mining operations into this major river.   

During the first half of 2024, we conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with the residents of Blyvooruitzicht and Ikemeleng settlement in Kroondaal. The interview participants were all over 18 years old, and they included local youth leaders, former mineworkers (white-collar and blue-collar black African males), and female residents. The interview questions were centred around the health effects of soil and water contamination from local mining activities and how research participants were responding to toxicity and economic distress. Participants also spoke about a range of other issues during interviews, which helped to illustrate Liboiron’s (2021) assertion that pollution is colonialism. They discussed local histories of land dispossession, land repurchasing for agricultural practices, and later land leasing for mining operations. They spoke of their experiences with the tender system that mining companies use as an illusion of support to local businesses instead of the mandated ‘social and labour plans’ (below); their experiences as mineworkers during the height of gold mining operations; impoverishment due to colonialism and apartheid; the 2012 liquidation of the company Durban Roodepoort Deep Limited; and their subsequent exclusion from employment by BlyvoorGold (Pty) Ltd, a mining company residents had supported by signing documents required for it to operate local Shaft 5.  

Overall, by integrating discussion of contamination data and data from ethnographic interviews, we aim to bring into focus the intersections between power relations, uneven distribution of contamination, institutional neglect of contamination, and ordinary people’s everyday struggles as they respond to their conditions of economic distress and pollution.

3. Measurement, production and normalization of contamination 

Acid mine drainage is the main ground source of contamination across the Witwatersrand mining belt. Hecht (2023) cites the Brenk report on the Wonderfonteinspruit water catchment, which passes through Blyvooruitzicht and supplies drinking water to the locality and some 450,000 residents located in Potchefstroom, the North-West province, some 30 miles away. This “drinking water destined for humans offered the most significant pollution pathway … Radiation exposure at half of the sampled sites exceeded the 1 millisievert limit for public exposure. Some sites were ten times that limit, and a few exceeded it by two orders of magnitude” (Hecht, 2023: 70).The water samples that we tested show that the levels of heavy metals tested in the waters of Rustenburg and Secunda are within the South African National Standards’ permissible limits (5 mg/l to 400 mg/l), but above that of the United States of America’s Environmental Protection Agency (commonly just over 0.0 mg/

The point is that for a century, pollution standards and numbers have made toxicity governable and often ignorable. For example, apartheid South Africa set uranium limits in water at 8,000 μg/l – over 250 times higher than the current WHO standard of 30 μg/l (Hecht, 2023). At multiple sites, radiation exceeded safe limits by orders of magnitude but was still considered acceptable. The South Africa government only aligned its permissible uranium limit with that of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2011 at 15 μg/l, partly due to the influence of international institutions such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (Hecht, 2023). And in the two decades before this, the limit had been lower: 140 μg/l in 1993; then 2 μg/l in 1998; 15 μg/l in 2004; and now 30 μg/l.

These shifts in permissible limits for heavy metals, as the uranium example shows, do not reflect better science, but are evidence of regulatory choices and contested politics about whose bodies count (Jha, et al. 2024). In 2007, the International Commission on Radiological Protection recommended that uranium levels should be reasonably achievable, with judgments on acceptable radiation exposure left to each society (Hecht, 2018). Contamination limits could thus be set at higher levels in some countries and at lower levels in others, meaning that people’s lives in different parts of the world could be treated unequally, making the experience of toxicity contextual (Peša, 2022). Accordingly, mining companies tend to locate some of their operations in ‘low risk’ contexts, thereby absolving themselves of responsibility as polluters. Indeed, when the Blyvooruitzicht Gold Mining Company Ltd sold its operations to Durban Roodepoort Deep Limited in 2007, the latter stated that neither the mining project they acquired nor its historic activities were a source of pollution (LHR, 2017). Durban Roodepoort Deep Limited also stated that its new mining project was not an economic, social or environmental liability to the local community or the state (ibid). Even though on paper, pollution levels in Blyvooruitzicht soils comply with South African standards – and are thus portrayed as ‘acceptable’ – the residents of this place are still exposed to contamination. 

The state and mining companies tend to normalize toxicity through tactics of minimalism, simplification and delay, even though they often clash over mine closures and how mining companies should handle contaminated postmining landscapes (Hecht, 2023). Shifting pollution limits and their uneven enforcement across space create administrative innocence for polluters while residents learn that dust, odour and strange water are ‘normal’. Thus, when contamination is never officially recognized as a problem and companies like Durban Roodepoort Deep Limited claim ‘no pollution’, residents internalize this normalization. This is Liboiron’s (2021) point: that to measure is to enact a politics of land relations, deciding what counts, and whose bodies count. Thus, we agree with Hecht (2023) that in the Gauteng City-Region, numbers have been calibrated to enable capital accumulation and austerity, not to limit cumulative exposure or ensure intergenerational health. 

These dynamics of pollution production and measurement illustrate what scholars of the African Anthropocene call the uneven distribution of planetary burden (Peša, 2022; Hecht, 2018). Peša (2022) argues that the Anthropocene feels different depending on where one is. In the Gauteng City-Region, it feels like uranium in drinking water and in dust. The epoch’s defining characteristic here is not abstract climate change but tangible, daily exposure to industrial residue. For Hecht (2018), when we speak of ‘our’ polluted planet, the ‘our’ obscures the fact that South Africa’s mining communities bear a disproportionate burden of exposure to toxicity – not as victims of a generic ‘human’ epoch, but as subjects of specific colonial and capitalist extraction. The Anthropocene, viewed from Blyvooruitzicht or Ikemeleng, is less about humanity’s collective footprint and more about how some communities are made to live with and in the waste of others’ accumulation. This African perspective reveals the Anthropocene as fundamentally about differentiated causation and exposure (Peša, 2022), where those least responsible for planetary degradation endure its most concentrated harms.l).[5] Exceptions are noticeable, though, with zinc being within permissible limits of both countries. In the coal mining context of Secunda, the recorded heavy metal values by far exceed the South African ceiling: 40,60 mg/l for arsenic, 1559,12 mg/l for copper and 54512,91 mg/l for nickel. Similarly, the manganese levels are higher than the South African standard in Kroondaal at 404,72 mg/l and in Secunda they range from 416,67 mg/l to 555,22 mg/l. With regards to the Blyvooruitzicht sampled soils, the amounts of heavy metals are generally within the US EPA and SANS standards.

Effects of pollution on humans and ecosystems

The presence of heavy metals in the soils and waters of mining areas is hazardous to humans and broader ecosystems (Bobbins & Trangos, 2018). Our research did not produce direct evidence of[GW3] [NM4]  this as we only obtained anecdotal health information from secondary sources. Similarly, our research respondents were not inclined to speak to us about their health conditions related to local mining operations, but were instead more interested in speaking about their livelihoods. That said, the Lawyers for Human Rights (2017) point to the possibility that the residents of Blyvooruitzicht will develop forms of cancer and suffer from decreased cognitive functioning and skin infections due to local mining operations. Figure 4 shows a body of surface water near the site of Blyvooruitzicht’s first uranium metallurgical plant. Residents are exposed to this surface water, especially children playing there in a context that lacks public recreational facilities. Household interviews at the Ikemeleng settlement kept referring to a child who was infected with bilharzia in 2008. They also highlighted skin-related problems as well as plumes of smoke and associated smells emanating from local mining operations. Figure 5 shows a polluted tributary that passes along the Glencore mine operation and Ikemeleng settlement, and the remains of a dead dog.

Figure 4: Surface water in Blyvooruitzicht

Figure 5: Tributary along the Glencore mine operation and Ikemeleng settlement

Moreover, dilapidated sewage systems are sources of hazardous waste, with the potential to cause gastrointestinal illnesses (Lawyers for Human Rights, 2017; Figure 6). Sewage waste also provides exposure to pathogenic bacteria, which are responsible for the transmission of multiple infectious diseases, including cholera and typhoid fever (ibid). Despite the contamination and possible health effects highlighted above, a leading member of the Blyvooruitzicht Community Leaders Forum, who was a mineworker at Blyvooruitzicht’s uranium processing plant, said that “we have to ignore health concerns related to contamination in favaor of livelihood formation – we are faced with death from hunger, not only from contamination, anyway”. The Blyvooruitzicht community is forced to choose between health and livelihoods. 

Figure 6: Deteriorating century old water and sewage infrastructure

In other contexts, such as the Ikemeleng settlement, communities are rejecting that health/livelihoods trade-off evident in Blyvooruitzicht. The Ikemeleng Environment and Justice Organization, for example, refuses the separation that the state and mining capital imposes. A statement by their chairperson, drawing on her experience of documenting mining harms with Bench Marks Foundation, articulates this clearly: “we can’t just be here breathing clean air, drinking fresh water and eating uncontaminated locally produced food. Our struggle for development is equally important.” This isn’t acceptance of contamination. It is a rejection of the false choice between contamination and economic wellbeing. Ikemeleng deliberately connects water testing (via WaterCAN) with legal advocacy (Centre for Environmental Rights) and economic empowerment (Khulisa), operationalizing the principle that clean water and decent livelihoods are a single development claim. More on these organizations below, but what distinguishes the Ikemeleng Environment and Justice Organization from Blyvooruitzicht’s survivalist responses is that it insists on collective infrastructures rather than individual entrepreneurship, and it frames contamination as a violation rather than part of an inevitable trade-off. We will see below that ordinary people are not apathetic about their situations. They adapt to their circumstances; attempt to make capitalism pay or make the most of its faultlines; and seek to change their living and working conditions through altering the terms of their relations with dominant powers. 

4. Community responses: resilience, reworking and resistance

Communities respond to the environments in which they live in resilient and innovative ways. They exercise their power by taking the position of responsibilised subjects, resigned to the responsibility of adapting to their impoverished and toxic environment (Ferguson, 2009). The subjects of our research create livelihoods from home gardens, water harvesting and road-side and home-based retail stores (see Figure 7). Some people use their mining related skills and experiences to repair basic infrastructure, such as leaking water pipes. A local company in Blyvooruitzicht, the Merafong Crusher, often contributes its workers and machinery (excavator and loader) to assist in those repairs, with food for workers and materials purchased from as far as Randfontein, about 50 km away, and costs often paid from donations by households and small retail businesses. Beyond these survivalist repair efforts, residents seek to ‘rework’ their living and working conditions without changing the terms of existing power relations (Coe & Jordhus-Lier, 2010). The re-mining of mine dumps, tailings and slime dams is a case in point. The Blyvooruitzicht Youth Forum seeks to participate in these activities as small entrepreneurs, making the most of capitalism’s fissures. This is potentially harmful, with re-mining loosening dust (laden with toxins) that is blown onto residential settlements and ecosystems locally and beyond. That said, such activities can bring improvements to the lives of ordinary people. That is why the people of the Ikemeleng settlement engage in ‘reworking’ strategies

Figures 7: Home gardening in Blyvooruitzicht and Rustenburg

Figure 8. Water harvesting and solar cooker in Blyvooruitzicht and Rustenburg.

Social and Labour Plans (SLPs) are part of those reworking strategies. At the stage of planning their operations, mining companies are legally required to submit SLPs to government, committing to contribute to host communities’ social and economic development (Department of Mineral and Resources, 2002). One mining company, Sibanye-Stillwater, financed a brickmaking initiative by a small group of people, while the Glencore mining company created opportunities for groups to run food catering, laundry and sewing businesses. Additionally, some local mining companies pay Ikemeleng pupils’ school fees and transport expenses. But the expenditure by mining companies on these activities is paltry in the broader context of mining profits and SLPs prescripts (Centre for Applied Studies, 2016). The entrepreneurial focus of SLPs tends to break up what could be joint efforts for inclusive economic practices that also sustain environmental health. Instead of rolling out universal public services and promoting collective economic development, mining companies turn individuals and groups into entrepreneurs. Their SLP approach undermines social solidarity, causing residents to be in competitive and conflictual relationships with one another. It is noteworthy that several of the above-mentioned projects were short-lived, and research participants in Ikemeleng expressed dissatisfaction with the effects of attempting to empower small groups and individuals.

Ordinary people also resist those in power and try to alter the terms of their relations to the neoliberal political economy. The Ikemeleng Environment and Justice Organization established relationships with organizations that operate at larger scales. The aim is to explore real alternatives, including the possibility of collective initiatives, advocacy for provision of universal public services, and other efforts that transcend the separation of ecological concerns from socio-economic development. The chairperson of Ikemeleng Environment and Justice Organization is a former local operator of Bench Marks Foundation, an organization that documents the negative impacts of mining operations across South Africa (CSIR, 2019). She came to be politically aware and empowered through her data collection work. Although the Ikemeleng Environment and Justice Organization is seeking procurement opportunities and joint ventures for the people of Ikemeleng from mining companies, it is also campaigning for mining corporations to compensate individual mineworkers for occupational injuries and to pay communities that are spatially displaced to make way for the expansion of mining operations. In addition, it mobilises its members and the Ikemeleng community to recycle used materials and ensure the cleanliness of their locality.

For realising its goals, the Ikemeleng Environment and Justice Organization created relationships with organizations such as WaterCAN, the Khulisa Social Solution, and the Right and Remedy Centre for Environmental Rights. WaterCAN is a network of citizen science activists who advocate for clean, safe and sustainable water. It tests household water for communities, including the people of Ikemeleng, providing data that can be used to lobby the local municipality and mining companies for clean water. Khulisa Social Solution trains members on collective strategies and tactics for pursuing social justice and economic empowerment. The Right and Remedy Centre for Environmental Rights provides legal services and assists in the production of important documents such the constitution of the Ikemeleng Environment and Justice Organization. It also educates communities about South Africa’s environmental laws and how to engage corporations on SLPs. These networks illustrate how the Ikemeleng Environment and Justice Organization is resourcing itself to advocate for socio-economic development and environmental justice. The organization is at an incipient stage, thus how successful its struggle will be remains to be seen.

Table 1 provides a summary of how the communities of Ikemeleng and Blyvooruitzicht respond to the mining conditions that are such a central feature of their lives. It breaks down the actors, enabling conditions (triggers), arenas, activities and typical outcomes. The three response categories above (resilience, reworking, resistance) show how communities navigate between immediate survival and long-term justice. When considering these kinds of responses to unequal power relations, ethnography is useful for understanding communities’ living conditions of hardship and toxicity, and their resilience and aspirations for justice. Ethnography allows for an in-depth exploration of the lived experiences that shape how communities perceive and react to their environment (Clerc et al., 2023 Javan et al., 2024; Lechner, 2016). It brings into sharper focus why ordinary people often seem resigned to their conditions, as they just seek to get by, delaying their own destruction (Watts, 2015; 2000). It also provides insight into the making of joint environment-economy claims and people’s attempts to shift the terms of their relations with dominant powers.

Thus, the interview excerpt from a member of the Blyvooruitzicht Community Leaders Forum, which echoes a refrain we heard across the mining landscapes of the Gauteng City-Region, highlights the reality of struggles for daily survival in a context where former mineworkers and residents lack conditions to enact sound ecological and economic practices. The statement is merely a response to his community’s infrastructural collapse, joblessness, insufficient connections and ignored corporate obligations. On the other hand, the chairperson of the Ikemeleng Environment and Justice Organization demonstrates an understanding of a holistic approach to development – environmental justice and public health are as important as the production of livelihoods, economic growth and infrastructure improvements. The Ikemeleng Environment and Justice Organization refuses the false choice between livelihoods and environment, establishing scaled institutional networks to demand both decent economic livelihoods and healthy environments.

Response	Typical triggers	Actors/alliances	Arena	Activities	Likely outcomes
Resilience	Mine liquidation/closures, being abandoned by public and private institutions, weak enforcement of environmental laws, lack of legal recourse, hunger, infrastructural failure	Individuals, households, group savings schemes, local companies, community and institutional resources	Homes, streets, local municipalities, tribal authorities, NGOs	Home gardening, rotating-credit schemes, water harvesting, sex work, cohabitation	Surviving, normalization of risk, reinforced masculinity
Reworking	Entrepreneurial framing of SLPs, outsourcing, left-over mining waste, limited economic opportunities	Small groups, youth forums, company ‘corporate social responsibility’ unit	Commodity value-chain edges, mine tailings and slime dams	re-mining, small businesses, economic empowerment, vocational educational institutions	New exposure to environmental contamination, social fragmentation and income inequality
Resistance	Legal openings, organiser capacity, visibility of new data, organizational networks, acute health cases (e.g., bilharzia, chronic health conditions, cancer)	Community organizations, NGOs, citizen science initiatives, mining companies, state institutions	Public sphere, law, negotiations, protests	Water and soil testing, lobbying, training in collective strategies and tactics, legal services, advocacy, protests	Shifts in terms of relations; joint environment-economy claims

5. Conclusion

The discussion above contributes to the idea of political ecology by centering how uneven power relations produce pollution as acceptable; how the actions of dominant powers constrain response possibilities; and how the trade-off between livelihood and environmental health is not an expression of ignorance, but a rational response under conditions of economic scarcity. But the apparent prioritization of livelihoods over environmental health is a false choice resulting from the contextual activities of mining capital, the state, civil society and community actors. Drawing on Bond’s (2021) insistence that we stay close to experience while acknowledging the planetary scale of extraction, contamination in the Gauteng City-Region embodies what Peša (2022) and Hecht (2018) call the African Anthropocene: toxicity is both a colonial-apartheid legacy and an ongoing neoliberal project. The ‘we’ who polluted the planet is not universal; it is mining capital and states that enable toxicity, normalizing it by historically under-measuring it, minimising its effects administratively, and distributing it along old fault lines of race, class and place. The ‘we’ who lives with that pollution is racially and spatially specific.

In the mining landscapes of the Gauteng City-Region, black African communities bear disproportionate exposure while mining capital and the state evade accountability through regulatory minimums and corporate liquidations. That said, white working-class communities and other categories of difference across space also experience contamination, albeit unevenly (Bond, 2021). David Bond highlights two remaining social safety nets, family and home in rural United States of America, being attacked through perfluorooctanoic acid. The health impacts he discusses, including testicular cancer and infertility, parallel the Gauteng City-Region’s experiences with bilharzia, skin problems and cancer. But if local contamination connects to planetary issues, global experience does not erase the specificity of local harm (Peša, 2022), the responsibility of the state and mining capital, and the capacities of ordinary people.

The responsibilities and exposures are radically unequal, and standards and numbers have too often underpinned that inequality. Residents do not choose between jobs and health so much as they are made to. Their responses include resilience and reworking. But they are incomplete responses, which are not horizons for justice because continuing to work in toxic environments obscures slow violence and cumulative exposures. Indeed, as coalitions, evidence and opportunities thicken, resistance as a strategy becomes feasible. These different kinds of responses to living and working conditions characterize communities that, while grappling with despair, seek to reclaim agency and demand change. The political ecology framework reveals that the livelihoods/environmental health trade-off is not a case of resignation, but a response to economic distress and environmental pollution. As in the rural United States of America (Bond, 2021), there is no going back to pre-contamination conditions in areas of anthropogenic activities like Ikemeleng and Blyvooruitzicht. This does not mean accepting current conditions. It means fighting for a better world today.

Policy considerations

This article argues that toxicity is about the exercise of power, its uneven spatial effects, and the responsibility that polluters place on ordinary people to deal with it. The government must re-make the relations responsible for these injustices by creating inclusive economic practices and shifting Social and Labour Plans away from a competitive micro-enterprise approach towards one that privileges universal public goods and services. Additionally, land relations and measurement politics need to be made explicit in governance; and citizen science must not be ancillary, but constitutive of governance processes. Moreover, the government must re-make the relations responsible for the normalization of pollution by adopting cumulative-exposure standards and shared monitoring; by funding public/citizen testing of pollution and supporting lawsuits; and by protecting organising infrastructures (legal aid, testing funds, public data portals) and treating them as essential. Only then will evidence cease to be used to excuse harm and begin to secure life. 

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[1] PGMs are constituted by platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium and osmium. They were discovered by geologist Dr Hans Merensky in1924-25, following a tip from an Eastern Transvaal farmer and an amateur prospector, Andries Lombaard (Mosiane and Dzerefos, 2025).

[2] Although we collected water and soil samples from Secunda and Kanana, we reference them in the article for quantitative, comparative discussion only. Due to space limitations, Secunda and Kanana are not part of the article’s qualitative discussions.

[3] Bushveld Igneous Complex is part of a 2-billion-year-old large and layered igneous rock intrusion.

[4] The Rustenburg economy experienced unprecedented growth between 1993 and 2007, when Rustenburg gained a reputation as one of South Africa’s fastest-growing cities. It had a compound annual growth rate of 6% (Mosiane and Dzerefos, 2025). This growth was based on a boom in the PGMs economy, which began to slow down from about 2007 due to growing demand for electric vehicles, worldwide oversupply of PGMs, and the global financial crisis (ibid).

[5] We provide a summary analysis of the water and soil tests conducted, with the detailed discussions to be published elsewhere because this special issue is not the right forum for that analysis.

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 [GW1]Do the yellow spots show where you collected samples? If so, say that here.

Note that Figures 2 and 3 don’t feature the names Ikemeleng, Kanana and Secunda

 [NM2]Figure 2: Blyvooruitzicht, city of Carletonville, and mining operations shown in yellow spots.

I have moved a footnote here (4) which should help clarify Kanana not showing on the map. Also, the maps that were showing Kanana, including specific sampling sites, were removed during the review process, as their detailed discussions of contamination content was not relevant to this platform/journal.

Please let us know if the map should include Kanana.

 [GW3]?? But you did directly measure toxicity levels in soil and water

 [NM4]Yes, soil only in Blyvooruitzicht and water and soil in the rest of the other cases such as Ikemeleng. But still we could not obtain health data from local medical centre, and even if we could, the practice of compartmentalizing toxins molecule by molecule makes to make a direct link between a disease and contamination results. For Hecht (2023: 78) it is extremely difficult to apprehend synergistic effects of multiple forms of exposure”. In fact, reading this Gabrielle Hecht’s book, it is impossible to make a direct heavy metal-disease link given the spatio-temporal behaviour of uranium, for example.