City of Tshwane is going green

Forget the city of gold because the City of Tshwane is about to get a whole lot greener with various projects and initiatives.

Today Tshwane residents are urged to take out their cellphones and participate in the fifth annual City Nature Challenge (CNC) which will run until 3 May. The four-day international Bio-Blitz challenges residents globally to capture and record plants and wildlife on the iNaturalist app.

The CNC was founded in 2016 and is run by the community science teams at the California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum in the US. Dana Wannenburg, MMC for the agriculture and environmental management department, said Tshwane is going green. “Because the BioBlitz encourages cities over the globe to capture the most observations from nature and to find the most species,” Wannenburg said.

“We are encouraging Tshwane residents to record as much wildlife and plants around them whether they are at home, in the office, or in nature,” Wannenburg added that the species can be anything from plants, insects, spiders, reptiles, amphibians, birds or mammals.

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“We all as residents must play a role in protecting our environment, by not neglecting our natural assets like rivers and wetlands we cause harm to the environment that will take years to reverse, pollution and illegal dumping makes everything worse, but by taking action we can protect our environment for the future, we have to start now and act now, tomorrow is too late.”

Meanwhile, the Hennops Revival Organisation has started the first polystyrene recycling point in Centurion. Founder Tarryn Johnson said the recycling point was put up at KidsWorld school on 28 April. “With all of the amounts of polystyrene we pull out the river all the time, it was beginning to become problematic to recycle because the company who recycles polystyrene had trouble processing the soil and river gunk on the collected polystyrene,” said Johnson. She added that company Supreme Moulding would donate R1 to the Hennops Rival for every 1kg of polystyrene recycling.

“Please play a part in a cleaner, healthier environment in Cen-turion by responsibly disposing of your polystyrene products, including all your Styrofoam trays from meat and vegetables, Johnson said. She said she wants to set up a few polystyrene recycling stations around the area soon. Gary Formato from Supreme Moulding said the company has been recycling polystyrene for the last 20 years.

He said they have realised that a lot of the waste companies do not collect polystyrene because it is a hassle.“It’s very expensive to transport around and it is very light,” Formato said, adding that a bag would probably only fill up about 7.5kg to 10kg of polystyrene. Formato added that the benefits of polystyrene are that is not poisonous and is easy to recycle.– marizkac@citizen.co.za