Marika Ireland and Margarethe DeCafneyer

‘We’ve picked up just under 1000 bags, which is about 11kg of plastic.’

‘We pick up plastic and turn it into jewellery that we sell online,’ says Margarethe. ‘We’ve been able to upskill 10 women, but our star employee is a lady from Zimbabwe called Boni. She can crochet very neatly and fast, so as soon as we have a lot of bags, we send them to her. She makes the cord for us and we make the jewellery.’ For every bangle they sell, R60 goes towards the turtle rehab initiative at Cape Town’s Two Oceans Aquarium – the aquarium rescues distressed sea turtles and rehabilitates them before releasing them along the Western Cape coast. ‘It costs about R12 per day, so R60 buys five days of rehab.’

Marika says that the business isn’t very scalable at the moment because they’re trying to do a million other things at the same time. ‘But every now and again, someone comes across our website and orders all our stock.’

Since they started the project in November last year, Marika and Marg have donated just over R10000 to the aquarium. ‘That adds up to about a thousand and something turtle days that we’ve sponsored. And we’ve picked up just under a 1000 bags, which is about 11kg of plastic.’

They’re also looking into making jewellery out of sea glass. ‘We want to start setting it in recycled silver and making charms. We want something that’s a little more upmarket – this is our answer to diamonds! In our view, diamonds are made by nature but refined by man; sea glass is made by man but refined by nature.’