When it comes to pollution in SA, the message is often in the plastic bottle

Seagulls took over Muizenberg beach in Cape Town during level 5 lockdown, when most people, besides ornithologist professor Peter Ryan and unruly surfers, were absent.

Lockdown allowed "Professor Plastics" the opportunity to study beach litter without human interference. He found that plastics were still the biggest source of pollution. This included yellow carrier bags regurgitated by the gulls.

Plastic debris is piling up across SA as consumers use more and more of it, with fast-paced lifestyles and the demand for on-the-go snacks, drinks and convenience foods exacerbating the problem.

A major report published by the World Wide Fund for Nature SA this week estimated that every year almost 1-billion units of chips, biscuits and chocolates are sold through formal retail markets in SA. This generates an estimated 1,600t of plastic packaging waste that is not currently recycled- and will most likely end up in landfills, open dumps or as litter.

WASTE PICKERS DO THE HEAVY LIFTING 

In 2017, 11 kilotons of plastic waste, the equivalent of 10-billion chippackets, littered SA.

And things are getting worse. From 2017 to 2018, total plastic consumption increased from 29kg to 36kg per person. More than half of the plastic raw material in SA goes into packaging.

Globally, an estimated 1,400 dump trucks' worth of plastic waste goes into the ocean every 24 hours, roughly 80% of which is packaging, says environmental engineer Lorren de Kock, co-author of the report, Plastics: Facts and Futures.

What's made things worse is that some South African waste collection and recycling operations, lacking the required investment and support, closed under lockdown and have not reopened their doors.

Even before the pandemic, less than half of "plastic scrap" in 2018 was collected for recycling in SA, and only 68% of that was converted to recycled materials.

At the moment, informal waste pickers collect between 80% and 90% of recyclable waste, earning an average of R50 a day for this grimy work. De Kock says they should be integrated into the formal economy.

WASTE (MIS)MANAGEMENT

Widespread illegal dumping continues to be a symptom of the country's "weak and fragmented waste managemet system".

Weaknesses in the system include inadequate collection and sorting infrastructure.

In some municipalities as little as 1% of the waste management spending goes to clean-ups of litter and illegal dumping. In Waterval Boven, a tourist attraction in Mpumalanga, pigs can be seen foraging at the local dump where litter spills onto the road, a stark example of this mismanagement.

The SA Plastics Pact: increasingly, businesses are joining this voluntary pact, the only one in Africa, which has targets for 2025 including that 100% of plastic packaging be reusable, recyclable or compostable, 70% of plastic packaging be effectively recycled and more post-consumer plastic material be used in their packaging;

• SA was listed as the 11th-worst plastic offender out of 192 coastal countries in a 2017 report, but it has since dropped out of the top 20;
• A regulation gazetted on Thursday will hold producers accountable for what happens to plastics at the end of their lifespan; and
• Incentivised projects are showing benefits. Consumers can get R9 back if they return a 2lCoke bottle. This project was piloted successfully in the Eastern Cape and is expanding to provinces inland. Coke works out cheaper in this bottle.

WHY LOCKDOWN HELPED

Lockdown boosted online shopping, which offers potential to reduce packaging because - since goods are not competing on shelves - the content has become more important than the container.

LITTER FROM AFAR

Ornithologist professor Peter Ryan, director of the University of Cape Town's FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, began beach surveys in 1984 with 50 beaches, and between then and 2015 did seven surveys at five-year intervals with his wife, marine biologist professor Coleen Moloney.

Each of the 32 beaches surveyed for bottle pollution around SA's coast was found to have some bottles of foreign origin, but the proportion varied dramatically, from 1% at some urban beaches up to 74% in the remote Namaqualand National Park.

Ryan once found that 190 bits of plastic had been swallowed by one great shearwater, a migratory seabird.

Plastic debris, by nature durable and lightweight, is not confined by borders.

ALL THE WAY FROM INDONESIA

Ryan found Indonesia was the No 1 source of high-density polyethylene bottles, which float along Africa's east coast because it is slap bang in the South Equatorial Current, which is a "conveyor belt of plastic litter across the Indian Ocean to Africa".

Cooldrink bottles, milk jugs, shampoo and bleach bottles are made from this HDPE, which in turn is made from petroleum.

"The Indonesian lids have been through the mill," says Ryan. "They have been chewed and spat out by umpteen fish over the three or so years it takes to drift across the Indian Ocean. The fish probably are attracted by the barnacles and other marine organisms growing on them."

In the 1980s, when Ryan landed on uninhabited Inaccessible Island in the South Atlantic, two-thirds of the bottle debris had floated 3,000km from South America with the west wind drift.

By 2009, Asia was a bigger source of this litter and by 2018, most bottles were from China, off ships. found Ryan, who has published more than 60 papers on plastic debris.