Gershwin Wanneburg
After four decades studying the impact of pollution on the environment, UCT’s Professor Peter Ryan has had enough. By now, we know the scope of the problem. It is time to act, he says.
“I started working on plastics back in the 1980s, looking at the impact of plastics on birds. By the end of the 1980s, we knew that putting plastics into the environment wasn’t a good thing. I don’t think there’s any need to do more research on that,” Ryan told Weekend Argus.
“What we need to do is come up with measures that are effective to prevent plastics getting out into the environment, and so most of my recent research has been looking at where it comes from, how it moves around … how to stop it getting into the environment in the first place,” he said.
Ryan’s work has gained renewed significance in recent months, given growing concerns about pollution, especially along the city’s beaches. Officials have blamed load shedding for shutting down sewage systems, resulting in spillages. In addition, they blame residents for clogging the system with solid waste.
Ryan said this time of the year load shedding was likely the bigger problem.
Even after a lifetime of analysing the natural environment, some of the revelations are still startling. For instance, in 2020 his team came across waste that had likely been discarded decades ago: a soft drink lid from 1993.
The discovery took place in April 2020, when he and UCT colleagues, Eleanor Weideman, Vonica Perold and Coleen Moloney, accompanied the Working for the Coast team and the City of Cape Town’s coastal management team, to conduct a survey of Milnerton, Muizenberg and Sunset beaches – an area that has come under the spotlight for high levels of pollution.
The study was carried out on 250 metres of beach at Milnerton in Table Bay, and at two 400 metre stretches of beach on the northern False Bay coast, at Muizenberg and east of Sunrise Beach. Over 10 days, the researchers collected 13 665 items of litter, weighing 78.7 kg. Most of the waste came from Milnerton.
Alarming as those results may sound, Ryan believed it contains some good news. A significant amount of the waste stems from the illegal disposal of plastics at sea, often drifting across, particularly the Indian Ocean from south-east Asia, and ending up on the east coast of Africa.
“Despite those offshore inputs, the vast majority of the litter that we find along our coastline comes from local sources, particularly around urban areas. So, if you go to a beach in Cape Town, more than 95% comes from local sources. That’s good news in a sense – it means we control our destiny,” said Ryan.
The academic, who spent time conducting research on Tristan da Cunha’s Inaccessible Island, believes that the country’s environment legislation is moving in the right direction, with the introduction of Extended Producer Responsibility, which requires manufacturers to have a plan for what happens to plastics beyond the point of sale.
“Those kinds of developments are very encouraging. It’s a matter of translating the legislation into action,” he said.
Ryan has seen first-hand the damage that plastics can cause to animals. Still, he believes there are bigger issues to contend with, such as climate change.
“I get really frustrated when people tell me that plastic poses the biggest threat to life in the ocean, which is patently false. But it is a visible and fairly easy issue do deal with because it doesn’t require a major change in our behaviour – just changing the way we dispose of our waste,” he said.
For Ryan, it seems, studying nature is not only a professional issue. It is also deeply personal.
“If people ask me, what do I think is the biggest impact of plastics on the environment, to me the biggest impact is the aesthetics … Personally, I find it quite offensive to go to the beach and see a strand line that’s more plastic than seaweed. If we carry on as we are, that’s going to increasingly be the case. It’s perhaps the most visible indicator of the way that we’re abusing the planet,” he said.
On Friday the Norwegian tall ship ‘Statsraad Lehmkuhl’ docked in Cape Town after 20 months going around the globe on its “One Ocean Expedition” to raise awareness and share knowledge about the role of the oceans for sustainable development.
The expedition was to provide an opportunity for scientists, students and others to explore and collect data on the status of the world’s oceans and provide insight around issues relating to biodiversity and the impact of humans on our oceans.
Weekend Argus