A local group, Help Up, are taking back Cape Town’s Black River with weekly cleanups and have helped the river’s environment to vastly improve over the last few weeks.
The Cape Town-based organisation cares about the people, natural landscapes and animals of the Mother City, and works to clean various catchment areas of plastic and other harmful debris that affect our rivers and beaches.
This past weekend, six happy Help Up volunteers visited Black River, a tributary formed by the Salt River and the Liesbeek River, to do some cleaning up.
The team worked for a number of hours to claim back the natural environment from pollutants such as plastic and a variety of dead animals that had built up in sections of the river. The innovative group even makes use of net-like baskets to catch plastics in the river, and visit the site each week to check the baskets and remove the debris.
Together they managed to gather a truckload of plastic waste on the weekend, leaving the river 10 times cleaner than it was when they arrived.
When the group took to Facebook to share their achievement, many locals were inspired by their efforts and wanted to know how they could get involved too.
“Wow wow wow! Hell yeah that’s how you do a cleanup! Thank you to Werner, Tracy and Debra who joined in today for our weekly muck in of the Black River! The extra hands make such a difference! Dead birds, dogs and cats, plastic plastic plastic. #helenzille your team had better bring a BIG TRUCK tomorrow!” said Help Up in their latest post.
You can visit this amazing cause’s Facebook here and get in contact with them to help with one of their many cleanup initiatives at 062 783 8229.
One thing is for sure, residents can count on this team of dedicated individuals to make Cape Town a cleaner place, one river at a time.
Pictures: Help Up Facebook