The Enviro-Buggy is an innovation that could change how SA combats microplastics at the beach and its all thanks to #seathebiggerpicture Ocean Initiative.
Cape Town, South Africa (09 November 2020) – #seathebiggerpicture (#STBP) Ocean Initiative was co-founded in June of 2018 by Chris Krauss, Shamier Magmoet and Tash Krauss. The organisation hopes to inspire youth and adults about ocean conservation through education.
#STBP popped up on our radar after we were told about an innovative beach “vacuum” system that they were working on. It is called the Enviro-Buggy.
“The concept of the buggy was my idea and stems from when I was trying to clean a square meter of beach on the high watermark in Muizenberg. It took me almost an hour and a half to clean up one square meter of plastic particles. This slow tedious process frustrated me and I thought there must be a better, more effective and efficient way to clean a beach of microplastics.
After doing a few hours of research I noticed there was no machinery out there that focuses on microplastics and removing them from the beach sand and in the dunes. Most beach cleaners only work on straight flat beaches, Cape Town’s beaches have dunes and rocky shores. So those machines available wouldn’t suffice for our local shores. The current beach cleaning machinery is also incredibly expensive making it inaccessible to most.
South Africa has some tricky beaches to access so the brief was quite specific. Considering there isn’t a beach on the planet that doesn’t have plastics on it I figured that a machine of this sort would be a good idea. One phone call later to my father-in-law and the idea of the Enviro-Buggy was born.” – Chris Krauss
They spent a year working on the development of the idea and then the manufacturing of the Enviro-Buggy. The first system was manufactured by TAU General Engineering in Johannesburg. It has been tested on the beaches of Cape Town and notes on how to fix it are already being implemented on the second build.
“Testing would need to be done on local beaches in Cape Town. We first tested the Enviro-Buggy at the Black River, which is one of our most impactful cleans. We tested it on street litter first and encountered quite a few challenges. Next was the beaches, here we experienced traction issues.”
“The Enviro-Buggy is still in its development and testing phase. We have learnt a lot from the first version and the second version is already on the drawing board. The testing over the last few weeks has been invaluable so the second iteration will be a vast improvement. Improving on reliability, manoeuvrability, filtration and suction is all being improved. It will also be smaller and easier to transport.”
The Enviro-Buggy is designed to be an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner which sucks up the microplastics found on the beach. The buggy sucks the surface sand up and pushes it out through various sized sieves leaving behind any plastic and litter. Chris explains how this sieving process is the most challenging part of their design so far.
“The Enviro-Buggy collects microplastics so when it comes to weight it’s difficult to quantify. Microplastics are the unseen pollutants and are at the most difficult stage to remove from nature. Microplastics are plastic particles less than 5mm so are already quite small to see on the beach sand. Anything less than the size of a grain of sand is almost impossible to remove so we are focusing on pieces between 5 and 2 mm. In other words, the plastics that have been forgotten, out of sight out of mind.”
We asked Chris about their success with nurdles. As we have reported previously, the Western Cape has had an increase of Nurdles on their beaches. As mentioned above, the challenging part is the separation of microplastics and organic matter, but they are having success getting the nurdles off the beach.
“We have been testing it on Fishhoek beach and it very easily sucks up nurdles. The filtering of those nurdles and separating them from organic matter is a bigger challenge. We have come up with a better filtration system on version 2 of the Enviro-Buggy.”
We asked Chris what to do if the public wishes to get involved? He says people are welcome to join their monthly clean-ups. If you would like information, you can find them on their Facebook page here.
“The best way is to join our monthly beach cleans, these are interactive and fun events where we clean and sort the rubbish we pick up. Our events are public and child friendly. Our next clean is on the 14th Nov starting at 7:30 am, at the Black River mouth in Paarden Eiland. The details can be found on our Facebook page as with covid regulations in place we still have a max capacity register. Look out for our flags and gazebo.”
Version 1 of the Enviro-Buggy is just the start! With the second on the way, even greater changes are about to take place.
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