Local photographer captures shocking images of rubbish in river
The uMngeni River is littered with thousands of pieces of plastic which was washed down by the heavy rains over the weekend.
A LOCAL photographer has captured shocking images of piles of rubbish that had been washed down to the mouth of the uMngeni River. Brian Spurr captured the images on Monday after the heavy rains, which caused severe flooding in parts of Durban and left six people dead. What’s more, according to Basil Pather, manager of the Beachwood Mangroves Nature Reserve, around 80 per cent of the rubbish washed down the river is made up of plastic.
Several cleans-ups along Blue Lagoon and in the mangrove reserve itself have shown more than half of the rubbish collected was made up of plastic bottles, roll-on balls and broken bits of polystyrene.
“I think people can’t see their carbon footprint because, most of the time, the changes to the environment are not something they’d pick up. With the drought, what we’ve seen is some people having been dumping in catchment areas, and when it rains heavily, like we saw over the past weekend, several pieces are washed down into the river mouth.
“Despite regular clean-ups and a net which protects big pieces of plastic floating through the reserve, there is still a large percentage of plastic pieces ending up in the reserve. We’ve also noticed rubbish thrown into the river at the Blue Lagoon side, which makes its way to the reserve. When these plastics decompose, the smaller pieces – the micro-plastics – are ingested by fish and then fed up the food chain, all the way to humans,” he said.
