Leisure Bay needs your help to keep litter run going
A flagship project called 'Litter Run day' run by a local non-profit organisation, Looking After Leisure Bay (LALB), has been instituted every Wednesday.
Clean-up operations have gotten underway along many parts of the KZN coastline, after the severe storms over the Easter weekend, where tons of debris was dumped onto the beaches.
A worrying sight was just how much of that debris is litter related and mostly plastic.
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The community members of Leisure Bay are doing everything within their power to try and halt plastic and litter from reaching this little coastal town’s beaches.
A flagship project called ‘Litter Run day’ run by a local non-profit organisation, Looking After Leisure Bay (LALB), has been instituted every Wednesday.
Headed by LALB’S chairman, Vanessa Murray, teams walk every road in the area between the Tongazi and Kuboboyi Rivers and pick up all visible litter from the verges and roads.
The aim is to remove the litter before it gets washed out to sea.
Last Wednesday, members who took part in the weekly litter run showed the Herald how much a weeks worth of litter, collected in one day, looks like.
“This is only the visible litter we collected, not any illegal dumping deep within the bush,” said Vanessa. “This is the stuff that people drop on the roadside as they walk or drive through Leisure Bay, 62 bags of it. It is backbreaking work to pick it all up. We pride ourselves on being one of the cleanest areas on the Lower South Coast,” she explained.
It costs the organisation around R1800 every time they undertake the litter run and they are 100 hundred percent reliant on donated funds.
“When the money dries up, we stop the litter run and all this rubbish stays in the environment. Multiply this by 52 and you get an idea of how much visible litter we collect in one year,” said a deeply concerned, Vanessa.
Looking After Leisure Bay has been approached by neighbouring towns who want to implement the ‘Litter Run’ in their areas. It makes perfect sense. Remove the litter before it gets into the ocean and it will make a difference.
If anyone would like to contribute they can contact Phillip at 083 299 7199.
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