PICTURES: World Clean Up Day tackles water pollution issues through Citizen Science

World Clean Up Day was celebrated on 17 September 2022, with many taking time to clean up and help with the global waste problem we all face.

The Paulshof  Residents and Ratepayers Association and many other volunteers gathered and cleaned the Paulshof River.

They did not stop there, they also hosted a Citizen Science demo “for the community to learn about the Spruit’s health,” said the organisers.

Citizen Science’s ability to involve the community in combating scientific research is probably the saving grace that most communities, civil servants and teachers are using to combat pollution and waste management issues.

Kyle Van Heyden, a University of Johannesburg PhD candidate focused on macro plastic pollution.

He describes global water pollution as having reached a point of no return, having “no solution, unless a very dramatic change takes place”.

While at the Paulshof river, I was not surprised to see the level of need for free, accessible water.

The Paulshof river not only provided water for the small community located just on its banks but while there, a church also gathered to perform their spiritual rituals and simultaneously, just up on the same river, people were taking a swim.

After all, access to water is a basic need and a way of life, yet access is slowly depreciating. In South Africa, The Blue Drop report showed that the water quality in South Africa is declining with a rise in E-coli and other water-carried diseases.

The Citizen Science campaign highlighted a few main keys for us.

• Poor waste management is one of the many, if not the main, reasons for water pollution.

• Decaying clean and safe drinking water means testing mechanisms need to be more accessible.

• Everyone needs to be more responsible for keeping our communities and water clean.

OUTA’s WaterCAN has developed a way for communities to keep track of their water by developing iLab testing kits that could make testing water easier and much more accessible. 

Manager of WaterCAN, Dr Ferrial Adams, says “We need communities to keep track of their water, the government cannot be everywhere all the time, and in that way, we can alert the government”.

Although the tests are slowly being rolled out, Dr Adams says, “We hope that everyone can have access to these tests and that we can have a database that will one day be accessible for everyone to know the safety of the water in the area they in”.

The Blue Drop report shows that most people affected by water issues live in underdeveloped areas. This is because they do not have access to safe running water and are usually dependent on rainwater, rivers and boreholes.

These iLab kits becoming more accessible would be a big advantage as “once waste gets into our water, it already past the point of saving. We need to prevent the waste from even getting into our water,” says Kyle Van Heyden.

Van Heyden says, “Plastic is the transportation mechanism of many diseases such as cholera, typhoid”.

Even with development and industrialisation, Cholera remains a big killer in South Africa.

The water in Paulshof looked relatively clean to me while I was there, yet after the Citizen Science experiments, I realized it was not.

“The reality is many people rely on river water for life, and sadly sometimes the water is deadly” and this cannot always be seen with the naked eye.