Start this in your own catchment. Please don't wait for us.

Phase 1 — Understand your catchment (4–8 weeks, near-zero cost)

1. Get the drainage network map

   Your municipality's stormwater or roads department holds it. Request it formally and in writing; in South Africa you can escalate under the Promotion of Access to Information Act if you need to. Failing that, map discharge points yourself from satellite imagery and by walking the coast and riverbanks — outfalls are visible, and the offending ones are visible from a distance.

2. Walk it in the rain

   This is the single most valuable thing you will do and it costs nothing but a wet afternoon. Be at candidate outfalls during the first substantial rain of the season. Film it. The difference between a site that needs a net and one that does not will be obvious, and that footage will do more in a municipal meeting than any document you write.

3. Score and rank the candidates

   Build a simple spreadsheet: outfall ID, GPS, pipe diameter and shape, observed load, catchment character, vehicle access, tidal or surf exposure, safety hazards, land ownership, photographs. Rank by load × feasibility. Start with a site that is easy, not the one that is worst — your first installation is a learning exercise and you want it where you can reach it quickly.

4. Find out who owns the pipe, the land and the water

   Usually three or four different parties: the municipal stormwater or roads function, the landowner at the discharge point, possibly a parks or coastal management function, and a catchment management agency. Identify a named individual in each. This takes weeks and there is no shortcut.

Phase 2 — Get permission (6–16 weeks, patience)

1. Ask for permission, never for budget

   The moment your proposal contains a request for municipal money it enters a queue measured in years. A proposal that says "we will fund, install, service, insure and remove this at no cost to the city, and give you the data" is an entirely different document, and can be approved by someone with the authority to do so.

2. Lead with the flooding answer

   Their first concern is liability, and it is a legitimate one. Your proposal must contain, up front: overflow design at hub and weir with capacity stated, maximum retained mass, the written service schedule, a named responsible person with a mobile number, a public liability insurance certificate, and an unconditional undertaking to remove the assembly within a stated period on request. Get all of this together before your first meeting.

3. Offer them the data

   Municipal officials are chronically short of evidence about their own stormwater litter loads. Offering to hand back weighed, geotagged, seasonal data is genuinely valuable to them and costs you nothing you were not already doing. It is frequently what turns a sceptic into an ally.

4. Get it in writing, with a review date

   A signed permission letter naming the sites, the responsible parties, the service commitment and a review date. Verbal approval evaporates when the official who gave it moves department, and they will.

Phase 3 — Build and install

• Survey the actual pipe. Nominal diameters lie and old outfalls are rarely circular or square to the headwall. Measure before you fabricate, or you will pay twice.
• Use a local fabricator. Stainless hub work is within the capability of a competent general engineering shop. Local fabrication means repairs in days rather than months, and it keeps the money in the region.
• Specify the steel by exposure. 304 inland, 316 in direct marine or salt-spray conditions. Getting this wrong is expensive on a two-year horizon.
• Design for release, not just retention. The question is not "will it hold the litter" — it is "can two people get a full, wet, heavy net off this pipe safely and quickly." Prototype the emptying operation before you commit to a design.
• Install with a clear forecast and photograph the finished installation from fixed reference points you will re-shoot at every service.
• Sign the site. A durable sign with the site ID, the responsible organisation and a phone number prevents most misunderstandings, theft attempts and complaints.

Phase 4 — Service it, forever

This is where nearly every project of this kind dies. Not from a design flaw — from a rota that quietly lapsed in the third month. Budget servicing as the largest recurring line and protect it before anything else.

• Baseline rota plus event trigger. A fixed interval regardless of weather, plus a mandatory service after any rainfall above a defined threshold. Write the threshold down.
• Never service during or immediately after a storm. Flows at outfalls kill people. Wait for the flow to drop and the bank to be safe.
• Two people minimum, always, at any water-adjacent site. No exceptions for a "quick look".
• No confined-space entry and no in-pipe work. Ever. If the job requires it, the job requires a different organisation with the right qualifications and equipment.
• PPE, hygiene and inoculation. Cut-resistant gloves, eye protection, waterproof boots, high-visibility clothing; a hand-hygiene protocol; sharps handling procedure and a sharps container; tetanus and hepatitis inoculation for crew. Contaminated water and needles are routine, not exceptional.
• Pay properly and pay on time. Crew reliability is your programme's reliability.
• Have a plan for the residual. Most of what you catch is not recyclable. Arrange licensed disposal and keep the receipts before your first install, not after your first full net.

Phase 5 — Measure it properly

Weak data is the reason this sector cannot raise money. Record the same fields, the same way, every time, from your very first service — you cannot reconstruct it later.

Use a consistent brand-audit protocol so your results are comparable with others' — the Break Free From Plastic brand audit methodology is the widely used reference and there is no benefit in inventing your own.

Phase 6 — Fund it

• Get your legal and tax status right early. In South Africa: a registered non-profit, and where possible Public Benefit Organisation approval with Section 18A status, which lets donors deduct. Corporate funders will also ask about B-BBEE recognition of their contribution. Sort this before you approach anyone; it is months of work and it is the difference between an easy yes and a polite no.
• Understand the EPR flows. Producer Responsibility Organisations and obligated producers now hold regulated budgets for post-consumer packaging. Learn who they are and what they are measured on before you pitch.
• Sell measurement, not sentiment. Your competitive advantage over a beach cleanup is that you can produce audited kilograms and a brand audit. Lead with that.
• Price the servicing honestly. Under-costing the recurring line to win a grant guarantees the programme fails in public, which damages every project that follows you.
• Never oversell. Nothing kills this sector's credibility faster than "removing ocean plastic" claims attached to a stormwater net. Say precisely what you did.

The failure modes, listed so you can avoid ours

Free templates — download and use

These are the actual record structures we intend to run on. They are deliberately plain CSV and Markdown so you can open them in anything, and they encode the fields that matter. If you start recording with these from your first service, you will have a fundable dataset in a season.

Take this material

Everything on this page is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Copy it, translate it, put it in your grant application, teach from it. If you improve on something — a better hub design, a servicing model that holds, a costing that reflects your region — send it to us and we will publish it here with your name on it.

And if you are stuck on a specific problem, write to us. Answering that email is the point of this organisation as much as any net is.