Save a Fishie and local fisherman teamed up to tackle Cape Town’s ‘Dirtiest Beach’. Here, they collected over 2 tonnes of waste from only a small portion of the beachfront!
Macassar, South Africa (19 August 2024) — When you’ve tackled as many beach clean-ups as Zoë Prinsloo has, deeming a beach the dirtiest you’ve ever tackled is a serious title.
Zoë, who is on her second Coast to Coast clean-up mission across South Africa with her organisation Save a Fishie has been cleaning beaches since she was just 10 years old. Since then, she’s broken world records, been awarded a Civic Award for conservation and has tackled hundreds of beaches (she’s only in her early 20s). Yet, one South African beach managed to stand out even to her for all the wrong reasons.
Macassar Beach in Cape Town stood before her and fellow volunteers, littered with a kaleidoscopic array of waste. Zoë shares that this was not only one small section of the beach either, but rather that nearly the entire 9km stretch looked like the photos.
Of course, Save a Fishie is not in the business of making a few comments and staring off into the distance disheartened. As environmental action takers, they’re the leaders who get down and dirty, no matter how overwhelming the task might seem.
Joining local fishermen, around 50 volunteers united to give Cape Town’s ‘dirtiest beach’ hope—at least for a portion of the stretch with plans to return. Together, they collected everything from lollipop sticks (a shocking number of them at that) to toothbrushes, plastic bottle tops and essentially every other kind of litter you can think of.
All in all, they filled two skips with a whopping weight of 2051 kilograms—over two tonnes.
Considering that last year’s Coast to Coast tour saw them collect just under 3 tonnes from 111 beaches, this 2-tonne effort from just a small part of the beach speaks volumes.
As Zoë says, there is an urgent call for help needed here, calling on the City of Cape Town to make a plan.
If just 50 people in over an hour could make such a significant change, the opportunity to return Macassar Beach to its natural beauty for good is not only possible but imperative.
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