For Funders, Brands and EPR Schemes
Buy kilograms with evidence attached, not photographs of volunteers.
If your organisation places plastic packaging on the South African market, you already carry an obligation and a budget for what happens to it afterwards. We offer the one thing that is genuinely hard to buy in this country: intercepted mass, at a named location, with a defensible chain of measurement behind every kilogram.
Why an outfall is a better purchase than a beach cleanup
We are not against beach cleanups; they are excellent public engagement. But as an environmental purchase they have three weaknesses that an outfall net does not share: the mass recovered per rand is low, the material is already degraded and dispersed, and the reported outcome is essentially a headcount. An outfall installation is the inverse — unphotogenic, continuous, and rigorously countable.
| Beach or river cleanup event | Funded outfall net | |
|---|---|---|
| When it acts | After loss to the environment | Before entry to the sea |
| Coverage | The day of the event | Every rainfall event, all season |
| Material condition | Weathered, fragmented, contaminated | Recent, largely intact, brand-legible |
| Reported outcome | Volunteers, bags, sentiment | Kilograms, GPS, polymer split, brand audit, photographs |
| Employment created | Volunteer hours | Recurring paid local servicing work |
| Audit position | Difficult to verify | Site-level records; independently checkable |
The regulatory case, stated plainly
South Africa's Extended Producer Responsibility regulations have been in force since May 2021. Producers of plastic packaging must register, join or form a Producer Responsibility Organisation, fund the post-consumer stage of their products, and report performance. That has created real, audited budgets.
Those budgets flow, correctly and efficiently, towards material that has recycling value — and South Africa does that well; 87% of PET beverage bottles were reported recycled in 2025. But EPR performance is measured on material recovered into recycling, and the material that actually leaks into the Indian Ocean is disproportionately the low-value fraction: films, wrappers, caps, lids, straws, polystyrene, sachets. It has no collector because it has no buyer.
Your recycling rate can rise every year while the plastic on the beach in front of your customers stays exactly the same. Funding capture at the outfall is how a producer addresses the fraction its recycling programme structurally cannot reach — and can prove it did.
For international partners — organisations such as Plastic Oceans and similar programme funders — the offer is a delivery partner in a high-leakage, under-served coastline, with local fabrication, local crews, published methodology and data that will survive third-party review.
Option one: sponsor outfalls
You fund a named outfall or a cluster of them for a defined period. We install, service, weigh, sort and report. You receive attribution at the site and in every dataset the site produces.
One pipe, one season
Survey, fabrication, installation, a full wet season of scheduled and event-triggered servicing, disposal, and a season-end report for that site.
Best for: a first commitment, a regional brand, or a company with a specific site or catchment it wants associated with its name.
A whole drainage catchment
Every significant outfall in one catchment netted and serviced together, which is where the operating economics improve sharply — one crew, one route, one municipal relationship.
Best for: funders who want a defensible claim about a named river, estuary or beach rather than a scattered set of installations.
Multi-year, multi-catchment
Sustained funding across seasons, including the fixed costs — a service vehicle, permanent crew, and the data and reporting function — that make continuity possible.
Best for: a producer or PRO seeking a flagship intervention with published, citable results and genuine coastal reach.
How a sponsorship is costed
We publish our cost structure rather than a price list, because the honest answer depends on pipe size, access and rainfall. Every quotation we issue breaks down into exactly these lines:
| Cost line | Nature | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Catchment survey and outfall ranking | One-off | Per catchment, not per outfall; shared across a cluster. |
| Hub fabrication (stainless, local) | Capital | Scales steeply with diameter. The dominant capital line. |
| Net | Consumable | Replacement budgeted per season; UV and abrasion are the killers. |
| Installation | One-off | Concrete anchoring, access equipment, occasionally rope or marine access. |
| Servicing labour | Recurring — largest line | Scheduled rota plus event-triggered call-outs. We do not compress this. |
| Vehicle, lifting and disposal | Recurring | Transport, hiab where required, licensed disposal of the residual fraction. |
| Measurement, sorting and reporting | Recurring | The part that makes your funding defensible. Roughly a tenth of the programme. |
| Insurance, compliance and admin | Recurring | Public liability, crew PPE and health, municipal reporting. |
Current fabrication and labour quotations are available on request and are re-priced per enquiry. We would rather give you a real number for your site than a marketing number for a generic one.
Option two: contract us
Where you have your own programme and need execution on the ground in KwaZulu-Natal or the wider South African coast, we will work as a subcontractor rather than a grantee. Scopes we will take on:
- Capture operations — install and service capture assets in a defined catchment to your specification and reporting cadence.
- Brand audits — systematic sorting and brand-counting of intercepted material to a published protocol, delivered as raw data plus analysis.
- Outfall surveys — mapped, photographed, ranked inventories of discharge points for a municipality, catchment agency or programme funder.
- Baseline and monitoring studies — seasonal flux measurement at fixed points, designed with your researchers or ours.
- Feasibility and costing — independent assessment of whether capture infrastructure is viable in a given catchment, including the case for not doing it.
What you get back, every quarter
- Total mass intercepted, by outfall, with service-by-service records.
- Polymer and item-category breakdown from sorted sub-samples.
- Brand audit results, supplied in full — including where your own brand appears.
- Dated, geotagged photography from fixed reference points, cleared for your own use.
- Rainfall and service-interval context, so the numbers can be interpreted rather than just quoted.
- Employment created: crew, hours, wages paid.
- A plain statement of what went wrong that quarter. There is always something, and a report without it is not worth reading.
The specific ask, right now
Fund the first ten outfalls in one KwaZulu-Natal catchment for one wet season, in full: survey, hardware, installation, crew, measurement and published data. That converts a proven mechanism into a costed, replicable, defensible programme — and it produces the first real South African dataset on what an outfall yields per season, which the whole sector currently lacks.