Water conservation starts within communities
Black Business Council in the Built Environment teams up with Hennops Revival’s Tarryn Johnston to tackle our water ways.

Water conservation in Centurion just got stronger as Tarryn Johnston of Hennops Revival and the Deep Water Movement teamed up with the Black Business Council.
The pairing aims to tackle our natural waterways from within the communities it touches.
“There’s so much magic happening right now, I can feel that great things are coming,” said Johnston.
She said that it was easy for people to assume that someone would address pressing issues on local waterways, but that it would take communities working together to make a difference.
Illegal dumping has been on the rise in Centurion, with several areas becoming hotspots for garden refuse and rubble removal businesses and residents take the easy and cheap option.
However, Johnston says that this just makes the problems worse in the long run.
“Everyone can find a back road to a river. It is an easy shortcut, you don’t have to drive far, and you can save petrol.”
Johnston said that informal waste pickers contributed more to recycling efforts than most residents.
“They are part of our community and perform an essential function,” she told Rekord.
“But if we do our own recycling, we stop feeding the system that requires the waste sorting sites set up in our vulnerable spaces.”
She also called on residents to be responsible about how they treat their waste.
Johnston advised that those using waste removal services request slips or invoices from legitimate dumpsites and avoid using known illegal dumpers.
“We are letting people get away with everything. There’s stuff happening on our watch, we need to have more accountability, and the only way we can do that is by including the community.”
Recently, Johnston signed an MoU with the Black Business Council in the Built Environment (BBCBE) Foundation to more effectively involve a wider audience.
BBCBE’s Tshepo Kgaudi said that the decision was a natural one as the built environment was inherently tied to the community.
“Being in the built environment, there’s a contribution that we can make because we are all indirectly responsible,” Kgaudi told Rekord.
“We come in to build beautiful structures but there is no follow-through after to see how those structures impact the environment and the society within those surrounds.
We thought we could have a fresh approach to see how we can be better informed. So, that when we design in future, we design with the environment in mind to bring in innovative solutions, and of course that talk to better conditions of sustainability.”
Kgaudi said that they were hosting an Indaba on April 4 and 5 to tackle pressing challenges such as poor quality projects, site invasions, inadequate transformation, and failing infrastructure head-on.
“When learning about the challenges we face around the built environment, such as dilapidating infrastructure, we realised that the biggest concern currently is the construction mafia, non-compliance in terms of substandard materials being used and people not completing projects.
We thought as a leading authority in that field, we should lead by example.”
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