## 4 Discussion  
Africa's rapid population growth, expanding economic activity, and ever-increasing urbanization have resulted in unprecedented waste material accumulation. Consequently, the number of potentially hazardous waste material sites has increased, despite the fact that the level of waste pollution caused by these sites has reached an emergency level across the African continent. However, to achieve the African Union's Agenda 2063: \"The Africa We Want\", Africa must pursue sustainable waste management approaches to ensure appropriate environmental preservation and to prevent further pollution. South Africa generates about 48 million tons of hazardous waste annually, and about 94% of that will eventually end up in dump sites [38]. According to the literature, dump sites represent an urban landscape with a distinct ecology and environmental conditions [39,40]. Dump site soils, for example, may form novel ecosystems with novel biodiversity composition, biogeochemistry, and ecological functions [41, 42, 43], which may be exploited for various biotechnological applications. However, the microbial and functional diversity of informal dumping sites is still poorly understood. As a result, we used a high-throughput sequencing approach to investigate the microbial community that is associated with informal dump waste soils from a variety of dumping sites in Johannesburg as well as its potential for functional applications. Table 1 displays detailed data on the physicochemical properties of soil collected from various solid waste dump sites. It is important to note that the chemical profiles cannot be compared to those of long-term landfills because the samples studied were not taken from a landfill that has been operational for decades. It is our view, however, that the chemical and biological profiles of soils near these informal dumps are still significantly influenced. The  
Figure 5: Community-level patterns of the different dump site soil bacterial community carbon metabolism. (**A**) Average well color development of the BIOLOG Ecoplate indicating the catabolic activity progression of the bacterial consortia in the different dumping sites over time. (**B**) Heat map showing the diverse bacterial catabolic activities against different substrates in the illegal dumping sites. samples ID1 and ID4 in this study were slightly acidic in nature, whereas samples ID2 and ID6 were alkaline. Changes in pH might be caused by a variety of different types of waste being dumped. For example, ID2 dumps had more automobile-related products, which could raise the pH; however, soil pH also has a significant impact on the bioavailability of HMs in various media and their subsequent toxic effects on biota [44]. Furthermore, soil pH is one of the key factors influencing soil microbial abundance. Consistent with the findings by [PERSON] et al. [45], our study found that the diversity of bacterial communities was profoundly affected by the soil pH. For example, samples ID2 and ID6 displayed high pH with low bacterial diversity compared to other samples. Microbial activity may be controlled by moisture in a variety of settings including salt water, food, wood, biofilms, and soils [46]. This study also demonstrates that sample ID5 had a very low moisture content (Table 1), implying that microbial activity during substrate utilization was low in comparison to the other samples (Figure 5A). CCA analysis of this study also further confirmed that the moisture content influences the bacterial communities of dump site soils (Figure 3), and it is well-known that soil moisture plays a key role in regulating the microbial population and its activity by influencing the redox potential, pH, oxygen, and CO\({}_{2}\) levels in soil [47]. In addition, the CCA results also corroborate the findings of a recent study showing that the majority of bacterial classes exhibit high resistance to a wide range of heavy metals [48].