Booms, bins and bags: the B3 solution to the BIGA problem!

Deborah Robertson-Andersson1, Gan Moodley1, Guy Caws2 & Bart Fokkens3

1 MACE Lab, UKZN - University of KwaZulu-Natal

2 DSW – Durban Solid Waste

3DUCT – Dusi Umgeni Conservation Trust

Books, Ideas and General-knowledge does not necessarily lead to Action. This is the “BIGA”

conservation problem. Simply knowing about a problem is not enough to solve it. Although most

people know that plastics are bad, this doesn’t stop us producing close to 300 million metric tons per

year of mostly single use plastic items, 80 % of which end up being discarded and 80 % of that ends

up in the oceans. Durban Solid Waste removes 1 ton of plastic a day from the Durban mile. However

when MACE Lab and Roxy’s SCUBA School run beach cleanup operations irrespective of the person’s

age and season the average amount of plastic picked up from Vetches Beach is 1.1 kg per person per

hour. This litter is collected at low tide after DSW beach clean-up has occurred. The composition of

this waste is different to that collected by DSW. The greatest number of items collected are straws,

ear buds, plastic bottle tops and smaller broken plastic pieces. This is due to targeting of these smaller

items by volunteers. Targeting plastic pollution in river systems may considerably reduce the amount

of plastic in the oceans. DUCT working on the Umhlangane and Umgeni rivers removes 300 bags of

mostly PET plastic bottles per low rainfall months but this increases to 1300 bags with just 40 mm of

rain, through boom trapping and collection from river banks. If these plastics get to the beach they

will breakdown to form microplastics so DUCT together with MACE lab and Paddle for the Planet (P4P)

have launched an initiative called Booms, Bins and Bags that tackles plastic pollution in river systems.

This is a pilot project and it is hoped that if successful can be rolled out to include other river systems

nationwide to significantly reduce the amount of plastic litter entering the oceans.