Silver lining for Centurion’s polluted Hennops River
· Citizen
The cliché that every cloud has a silver lining is often just that – because many of the awful things happening around us do not have an upside.
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But, the story of what is happening to the tsunami of garbage clogging the Hennops River in Centurion has a remarkable optimistic aspect to it.
For years, eco-activist Tarryn Johnston, founder of the non-profit organisation, Hennops Revival, has been trying to stem the tide of polystyrene and plastic which has been choking the river.
At times it is so bad that a mass of rubbish covers the entire river from bank to bank, piling up against bridges.
Hennops Revival gave up counting the garbage it removed from the river when the number reached five million kilograms in just six years.
That’s an incredible 5 000 tons – or the equivalent of 10 fully-loaded Airbus A380 super-jumbo planes.
Johnston attributes the pollution to illegal dumping, illegal sand mining and general littering.
Much of the waste comes from informal settlements and underserviced areas, where storm water channels are sometimes used as dumping sites.
When it rains, the waste is carried into the river and, ultimately, makes its way to the ocean, if not trapped along the way.
But the silver lining to this particular environmental woe is that Johnston’s experiments with recycling the waste have led her to develop a useful product from the polystyrene, which can be recovered instead of being sent to a landfill.
“We just started experimenting in my garage at home and I was like, hang on, wait, this is a paint,” she said.
She foresees poor people upstream being able to harvest the polystyrene and turn it into paint for sale, creating small businesses in the process.
She is looking for investors and scientific partners to help and we can’t think of a better cause.