More than 130 volunteers descended on Robben Island to help with what has been hailed as the landmark’s largest waste clean-up to date.
Guided by the national PET Recycling Company (Petco) and Plastics SA, the group embarked on the island’s biggest waste collection drive on Friday.
The World Heritage Site draws more than 300 000 visitors annually, and is plagued by visitor litter as well as waste from passing ships and land-based sources - the latter washing into Cape Town’s stormwater drains and rivers, and ultimately Table Bay.
According to UCT researcher Peter Ryan, an expert on beach litter along our coastline, roughly 10 times more litter washes ashore at Milnerton than at Koeberg, indicating the importance of local, mainly land-based sources of litter within the bay.
Petco stakeholder relations manager Janine Basson said that since the majority of ocean waste was derived from land-based sources, stopping waste at the source was the most effective way to deal with marine pollution.
“Keeping recyclables, like PET plastic bottles, in the economy - instead of them ending up in landfills - is key,” said Basson.
“While good strides have been made, there is an urgent need for industry to redesign products and packaging that is compatible with available recycling infrastructure, and to work towards phasing out non-recyclable waste completely,” she said, adding that Petco had made Designing-for-Recycling guidelines available on its website.
Plastics SA sustainability manager John Kieser said the plastics industry body, which includes polymer producers, converters and recyclers, had been active in cleaning up Robben Island for the past 20 years.
“Some of our most successful clean-ups have been on Robben Island, including one in which we stopped the incineration of waste, and managed the closure of two dump sites. We also started the Working for the Coast project on this island, with two weeks of solid clean-ups,” Kieser said.
He added that Friday’s clean-up represented the biggest stretch of the island’s coastline they had yet been permitted to target, which was essentially the entire circumference, except for the penguin breeding area.
The clean-up was organised and managed by The Beach Co-Op, using the “Dirty Dozen” methodology developed by Ryan to record and track the sources of collected marine waste.
Co-op director Aaniyah Omardien said employing this methodology at all clean-ups helped to improve the city’s waste management strategy.
“Litter on Cape Town beaches has grown 300% from 1994 to 2012, with the human population growing a modest 50% over that same period, which means we are producing more litter per person. It will be informative to see what we find by comparison on Robben Island,” Omardien said.