Fighting litter on the beaches

AN ARMY of volunteers and a salvage team used the lull between Monday night’s storm and this weekend’s expected rains to clear Durban’s beaches of litter, ranging from plastic to tankers that had flowed down the uMngeni River and beached.

Alison Simpkins, of the Adopt a River NGO, said about a ton of recyclable plastic a day had been separated from other debris and carted off to be recycled.

“We have had some amazing volunteers and we’ve really made a dent in our little stretch here,” she said from her base camp near Blue Lagoon.

“And we’ve started moving further south, which is a good thing. It means that a lot of the waste has been removed.

“We’ll just continue as long as the weather allows and we’ll just move it off the beach.”

Crowds gathered to watch Shaun Gordini and his salvage team remove two tankers.

One was set in a frame that would have made it fit on transport like a container, and was on the beach close to the pier at Blue Lagoon. The other, on a trailer with wheels, was on Thekwini Beach.

Gordini, the owner of Gordini Towing in New Germany, described it as “an unusual job”.

“The sand was a problem. We were held back by the sand. Normally we’d use two trucks for something like this but they wouldn’t let us have two trucks here,” he said at the Blue Lagoon job.

Two trucks with cranes and winches were involved in the second operation, where his team cut the tanker in two pieces with blow torches to take them out one by one.

Back among the litter-collecting volunteers, Milisha Bakool and Isabella Mendes were saddened to see so many children’s toys.

Keith Towney said he was surprised there was a population explosion in South Africa.

“My goodness, there are a lot of condoms here. And an amazing amount of deodorants. It’s just very sad. Now the tide’s coming in and it’s just going to wash it all straight back out to sea,” he said on Thursday afternoon.

His company does monthly cleanups with Adopt a River.

His colleague, Chris Brecher, said he was surprised at the scale of how much litter there was.

“Especially polystyrene.” Jonathan Dlamini took a moment off to kick a ball around.

“I’ve found two now. This is the second one,” he said.

Tree trunks still bobbed around in the surf.

| SHELLEY KJONSTAD African News Agency (ANA) AS MORE dark clouds loom over Durban yesterday, (from front) Gabriel Attwood, Kelly Gasson, Luke lerothooi and Gillian Attwood join clean-up operations on the beachfront near the uMngeni River mouth at Blue Lagoon. Many other people and organisations began removing plastic from the debris washed up on the beaches after the floods.

| SHELLEY KJONSTAD African News Agency (ANA) VOLUNTEERS, from left, Odwa Macingwane, Sanele Shusha and Sfiso Luvuno of Green Corridors Litter Boom Project at the clean-up operations on Durban’s beachfront yesterday.

| DUNCAN GUY SALVAGERS cut up one of the tankers that washed up on Thekwini Beach before removing it.