Some of you may know that Action Ad’s late co-founder Hanlie van Niekerk made art out of junk. She turned bits of rusty metal found in the veld into brilliant artworks.
I really loved them. I was less keen on her “flotsam” art, old shoes that had washed ashore that she made into a kind of mural. I was thinking about that recently when I read about research on litter on Cape Town’s beaches. I was surprised to learn that during lockdown – serious lockdown in April when beaches were deserted – there was almost as much litter on the shore as there had been when beaches were open. How come? Well, here’s the thing: The biggest chunk of litter on our beaches does not come from beach-goers, but from people who chuck rubbish into the streets in urban areas, which could be many miles from the coast. It washes into the gutter, then into stormwater pipes and into the sea. Or into rivers and into the sea. Researchers found that during those 10 days in early lockdown there was enough rubbish in the stormwater drains to keep “normal” levels of litter washing into the sea and onto beaches. That is a horrible thought. The research was a joint operation by UCT’s ornithologist Peter Ryan, the City of Cape Town and government’s Working for Coast programme. The researchers collected litter every day from 22 April to 1 May at measured spots at Milnerton, Muizenberg and Sunrise Beach. Each piece was washed, weighed, counted and categorised: 13,665 pieces weighing 78.7kg – an average of 1,367 new pieces of junk daily along a 1.050km stretch of coastline. Plastic, including cigarette stompies, made up between 92% and 99% of the litter items, and between 85% and 94% of the weight. Researchers found that almost all the litter from food packaging was from “snack food” – sweets, chips and ice cream – typical also of street litter. Straws were outnumbered by lollipop sticks and earbud sticks at all three beaches. They identified the country of manufacture of 1400 items, and found 94% were made in South Africa. So, we can’t blame passing ships for beach rubbish as much as we might want to. As one councillor explained: “If you throw your cigarette butt into the street or a chocolate wrapper out of the car, it is likely to end up in a stormwater pipe and eventually drain into the ocean.” It may seem strange to do research on where beach litter comes from, but it is only once we know the origin that we can set up ways to try to prevent this. It’s not just that litter looks ugly. It is that it entangles, maims or kills turtles, seabirds, dolphins, seals, whales and many other marine creatures. Here is a frightening fact: When plastic breaks down into micro-plastic, it is ingested by plankton, and so can travel up the food chain into fish we eat. We could end up eating our own pollution. All because someone could not be bothered to bin it.
