It was International Coastal Clean-up Day on rainy Saturday so i opted to do my share on sunny Sunday, retrieving litter out of Knysna’s Salt River which feeds into the Knysna Estuary.

I’d meant to organise some teens to join me but recent politics has zapped all my time. But we don’t need an excuse to clean up our environment, not even a special anti-pollution day. Unfortunately, there are people who don’t care about our town’s natural beauty and our health so its up to us to make up for them.

Further motivation is that our tourist based economy relies a lot on the beauty of our environment.

And it can be fun.

Dragging half a mattress and a tire out of the mud and moving them 100m was far more challenging than i expected. Cheap alcohol containers, plastic and bottles likely thrown into the bushes and river by vagrants, were sometimes difficult to get to.

80-minutes in the mud absolutely exhausted me in a good way. I never would have experienced the beautiful day and thousands of crabs if i’d stayed on my computer as i had for days.

After i took the photos shown here, i put that dangerous black bag of jagged things into the tire with the mattress atop, off the road. Knysna Municipality’s Waste Management Department was polite, saying that they’d send a bakkie to collect it today 🙂