Hennops River Revival, a non-profit organisation (NPO) with its primary aims being to fight against any form of pollution of the Hennops river, last week marked four years since its inception.
Its founder, Tarryn Johnston, said for the past four years the organisation did more than 700 clean-ups, created more than 8 000 job opportunities and has been a platform for 24 000 plus volunteer hours with more than 162 500 bags of waste removed from the river.
“Along with enormous amounts of waste and debris that cannot be bagged, our estimated total waste removed is well over 4 585 280kg. Our work has an average impact on 207 640 000 kilolitres of water per year,” she said.
The Pretoria News previously reported that the banks of the Hennops River in Centurion becomes a hive of activities with some recyclers sorting out their trash there during the week.
During rainy seasons the banks are piled up with debris carried by rainwater and winds, risking the lives of species in the river.
Worn-out furniture, empty tins, plastics and tree branches are usually among the nuisance objects picked up near the banks.
Having made some strides in cleaning the Hennops River, Johnston told the Pretoria News about plans to teach communities across the country on how they can take care of their rivers.
She has opened up a sister NPO, called Deep Water Movement, with the focus being to “empower people to do the same things within their own communities and with their own river and with the potential to be a channel for funding”.
“This is because I found Hennops River obviously restricts us to the Hennops River whereas Deep Water Movement can be country-wide, continent wide, global. Who knows? I am not going to place any limit on that,” she said.
Johnston explained that the aim with Deep Water would be to empower communities to target early interventions.
“So, we go out to whichever river. Not all of them are in the same condition that Hennops is in. Hennops River has problems on every level. There are rivers that don’t and those are ones that really need to be stopped now from reaching that point,” she said.
She recounted that Hennops has problems which started in the 70s that “we haven’t yet started to reverse”.
“It is not going to be fixed tomorrow and that is fine. We will still work with it and we will do whatever we can within our capacity within our community. And that is the point: everybody needs to do what they can where they are with what they have,” Johnston said.
Rivers, she said, could face all sorts of challenges such as sewage and industrial issues.
“In January (2024) we are going to be starting with basic planning courses, which we will offer to students, to schools, teachers and maintenance staff so that they can fix their own taps -- leaking taps and toilets. It would save them money by not having to call plumbers to fix the leaks,” she said.
Some projects in the pipeline include starting up moneyless hubs where people can come and exchange their waste for something of need such as a face cloth, soap or clothes, mostly donated by churches.
“We would work it in different phases where we would supply the community with different containers where they could then separate it at source. So they would put food waste in one container, recyclables in one container and general household waste will go into another container,” she said.
People, she said, would be taught how to see value in their waste and how to create new products from waste.
“We would have an arrangement made with whichever municipality to have general waste pick-up sites. And obviously when everything is being separated we minimise the problems of rats and just everything being dumped everywhere,” Johnston said.
Pretoria News