Durban · KwaZulu-Natal · South Africa
Every bottle in the sea passed through a drain we could have netted.
South Africa leaks tens of thousands of tonnes of plastic into its rivers and oceans every year. Almost all of it travels the same way: down a street, into a stormwater drain, out of a concrete pipe, into the surf. That pipe is the cheapest, most accountable place on earth to stop it — and almost nobody is standing there.
The scale of it
The numbers are bad, and they are not improving on their own.
South African plastic estimated to be carried to the ocean every year.
Verster & Bouwman, S. Afr. J. Sci. (2020)
Plastic leaking into the South African environment annually — 68 kt of it straight into fresh and marine water.
Stafford et al. (2022)
Of South African domestic waste never enters a formal collection system at all.
Verster & Bouwman (2020)
Projected growth in South African plastic pollution by 2040 if nothing changes.
Stafford et al. (2022)
Full sourcing, methodology and caveats on The Problem. We would rather quote a conservative number we can defend than a frightening one we cannot.
The leverage point
Beach cleanups happen after the loss. Recycling never sees this material. The outfall is the only choke point.
By the time a bottle is on a beach it has already been shredded, weathered, colonised and dispersed — and collecting it costs an order of magnitude more per kilogram than catching it dry. By the time it is in the surf, it is gone. Every piece of that plastic, though, passed through a narrow, mapped, fixed, publicly-owned concrete pipe on its way there.
Stormwater outfalls are a countable, finite list. In a single metro there are hundreds — not millions. They concentrate the flow of an entire catchment into one point you can stand next to, put a net on, and weigh what comes out. That last part matters as much as the capture: an outfall net is the only plastic intervention in the country that produces a defensible weight, a brand audit and a photograph for every single kilogram removed.
Which is exactly what a funder needs, and exactly what nobody is selling them.
What we do
Nets on pipes. Local crews servicing them. Every kilogram weighed and published.
Map the offending outfalls
Catchment walk-downs after the first rain of the season, when the "first flush" carries the season's accumulated litter. We rank outfalls by observed load, access and safety, and photograph each one. The offenders are obvious within an hour of rain.
Install an engineered net
A 304/316 stainless hub anchored to the pipe end or into concrete, carrying a commercial HDPE net that captures gross pollutants down to 5 mm. Built-in hub and weir overflows mean a blocked net can never back water up into the street.
Employ people to empty them
A serviced net is the whole product; an unserviced net is litter with a budget line. Paid local crews on a fixed rotation, plus after every significant rainfall event. This is where the jobs are, and where most projects like ours quietly fail.
Weigh it, sort it, name it
Each haul is weighed, photographed and sorted — polymer type, item category and, where legible, brand. That produces a brand audit: the single piece of evidence that turns a cleanup into a policy and procurement argument.
Three ways in
Whoever you are, there is something here for you to take.
Buy verified capture, not a logo on a beach
Sponsor named outfalls, or contract our crews for capture and brand-audit work. You get weight, GPS, photographs, polymer breakdown and a quarterly report you can put in front of an auditor.
Start this in your own catchment
Everything we know — permissions, hardware specifications, budgets in rands, crew safety, service intervals, the failure modes — is published free. We would far rather you copy us than wait for us.
Use our outfalls as instruments
A serviced net is a flux-measurement device that runs all season. We will host sampling, follow your protocol, and hand over the raw data. Standing invitation, no exclusivity, authorship to whoever does the work.
Why this exists
This is happening on our watch. The damage being done to the KwaZulu-Natal coast right now is damage my child will inherit, and it is being done in a period when it could still have been prevented cheaply. That is the entire argument. Everything else on this website — the specifications, the costs, the funding model — is just the working out.