About

A project that was right, and then sat still for years.

This page tells you exactly where Plastic Cleanup SA stands, including the parts that do not flatter us. If you are considering funding this work, you should be able to find that out here rather than in a meeting.

Where the project actually is

Status, plainly stated Plastic Cleanup SA is a concept validated by a single field test, not an operating programme. In 2019 we monitored Durban outfalls during rainfall and ran a temporary net at one test site, which recovered roughly 350 kg of waste in about an hour. That is one measurement, at one site, on one day. There are currently no permanent installations, no employed crews, no funding and no ongoing operations. The founder has run it alongside other businesses and a family, and there has not been enough of either time or money to get it off the ground.

We could have written this website in the present tense and implied a great deal more. Organisations in this sector do, routinely. But the entire value we can offer a serious funder is that our numbers can be trusted, and you cannot establish that reputation with a page that overstates your own position.

So why is this site here at all?

Because two things turned out to be true. First, the mechanism works — 350 kg from one pipe in one hour is not ambiguous. Second, in the years the project sat idle, people kept writing: academics asking how to measure this, campaigners in other provinces and other countries asking how to begin, students looking for a thesis site. There was no useful place to send them.

So this rebuild does two jobs. It publishes everything we know for free, so that the next person does not lose the same years we did — that is the open playbook and the research invitation. And it makes a specific, costed, honest funding case for restarting the operational work, aimed at the corporate and EPR budgets that now exist for exactly this purpose — that is the partnership offer.

Why the founder is doing it

The damage being done to this coastline is happening now, on my watch, in a window when it could still be prevented cheaply. My child will inherit the consequences of what is going into the sea this season. That is the whole reason, and it does not require any further justification than that.

Oliver Hilton is a KwaZulu-Natal-based engineer and entrepreneur with a background in enterprise IT, electronics, marine and watercraft engineering, and running small operating businesses in South Africa. That last part is more relevant here than it sounds: this is not a project that fails for want of a clever idea. It fails on fabrication quotes, service rotas, vehicle scheduling, municipal permission letters and payroll — which is ordinary operational work, done properly.

What we believe

  • Measure or don't claim. If we cannot weigh it, we will not report it.
  • Publish the failures. Missed services, overflow events, sites that did not work. A report without bad news is marketing.
  • Copying us is a success, not a threat. We are not trying to build a monopoly on netting pipes.
  • The jobs are part of the outcome, not a cost to be minimised out of the model.
  • End-of-pipe is necessary and insufficient. We will keep saying so even to the people funding our end-of-pipe work.
  • No greenwash. We will not let a funder describe stormwater capture as ocean cleanup, and we will not sign away the right to say so.

What would change with the first funding

  1. A catchment survey and ranked outfall inventory

    The first properly documented list of priority discharge points in a KwaZulu-Natal catchment — useful to the municipality whether or not we install anything.

  2. Ten outfalls netted and serviced for a full wet season

    Hardware, installation, a paid crew, and servicing that does not lapse in month three.

  3. The first real South African dataset

    Mass per outfall per season, with rainfall and composition, published openly. The number the entire sector currently guesses at.

  4. A costed, honest replication model

    Real rand figures per outfall per season, published, so that the next organisation can raise money against a defensible budget instead of a hopeful one.

If you have read this far

You are probably either someone who can fund this, someone who wants to do it themselves, or someone who studies it. All three are useful and all three are welcome. The playbook is free and needs no introduction; for anything else, write or call.

Get in touch