COASTAL CLEAN-UP: 170+ Plastic Beverage Bottles Collected at Die Gruis

On Wednesday, 16 September 2020, Overstrand Municipality took Cape Nature Walker Bay and the Department of Environmental Affairs’ (DEA) youth co-ordinators to clean up the beach between Die Gruis near De Kelders and Sopiesklip.

The event forms part of the International Coastal Clean-up Day - an annual global event where thousands of concerned volunteers rally together to collect trash and debris on beaches, rivers and estuaries before it has the chance to wash into the ocean during spring high tide. The theme for 2020 is ‘Trash free Ocean’.

The total tally of rubbish collected by this team alone was sobering.

“We picked up 32 bags of rubbish (weighing 185 kg) in this 5 km stretch,” said Overstrand Municipality’s Environmental Management Services (EMS) field ranger and facilitator of various clean-up projects, Marco Cornelius. He was assisted by DEA Youth Co-ordinator, Steven Njokwana.

The clean-up collection included plastic bottle caps, broken glass bottles, chip packets and other food wrappers such as take away containers, plastic bottles, fishing lines and fishing nets.

Rubbish and debris are documented for statistics to help identify the type of litter, possible sources, and to motivate suggested changes for manufacturers that might help reduce various types of waste. Plastics|SA collates all information, and this is fed into the global statistics held by Ocean Conservancy.

Similar clean-up events were hosted by a network of partners and organisations across the Overstrand. Thank you all.