Our Field Operation in Durban, South Africa (Part 1/3)
Although our focus is robotics and AI, all our management team members have to prove, that they joined or organized a classic cleanup-project where you get also your hands dirty. Since there are already a lot of NGO's in Europe and North America, we are going into countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. For the travel lovers among you, this has of course touch of adventure!
Today we are reporting from our last project in Durban. Our approach was first to contact local NGO's if there are any, listen and learn, and analyse the situation and the current process.
Why Durban? In recent years, there was a very tense situation regarding the pollution as you can see on the next pictures.
Sever storms, floodings, too small sewage treatment plants etc. led to a situation, that a lot of garbage was washed up on the beaches. The whole marina was flooded with plastic. Ships could not leave the port …
Since then, authorities and local NGO's did a lot to improve the situation. Nevertheless, there is still air upward.
Our approach was to meet first local people and NGO’s to discuss the problems, to learn and to analyze the processes. One of the issues was of course, that there were too less people to collect all plastic and garbage from the beaches and coastlines.
Like some other NGO’s, we provided some money, to put a prize on the plastic and to get some people from the street, especially the poor and homeless, which have to get the money for the next meal. After some days, we had about 60 - 70 people helping us. And after 5 weeks, about 96’000 plastic bottles were collected. We paid for each bottle up to 5 €uro Cent, which was probably too much, but effective. At the end, this exercise cost us 5’000 €uro. Unfortunately, we had no more budget. Next time, we hope, we can count also on some donations, since it would be easy to scale up the whole process and to gather some millions of bottles. At the moment, everything is paid privately by our team members .....
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