Surfer and beach user, Deon Lategan and his wife, Tanja are avid campaigners against environmental pollution. Picking up rubbish off the beach is something they do by habit, not just because there’s a competition on the go. But seeing as Zigzag and Tuffy have given free decomposable trash bags in the latest issue (Vol. 39.7), they’ve put them to good use at their local. Their efforts puts them in the running to win a brand new stick compliments of Firewire and Share The Stoke Foundation through the Tuffy Beach Clean-Up competition.
Deon and Tanjs, leading by example at Albatros Beach in J-Bay.
“My wife Tanja and I pick up plastic off the beach every time we’re on it out of habit – not for glory – just because it’s right and you leave the beach better for it. Anyway, when we saw that there was a beach clean-up on Sunday morning down at Albatross we decided to pull in and use the Tuffy bags. There’s been a lot of rain recently which has pumped pollution out into the sea via the storm water systems and rivers.” – Deon
It’s not so tough, when you’ve got a Tuffy ek se!
I concentrated on the high water mark though, and was able to fill a whole bag mostly with fishing line. Fishing Line is a huge problem because it takes forever to break down and tangles up everything in its path including marine birds. By the way, Tanja is the co-ordinator of the J-Bay recycling project, which is an amazing project run in Jeffreys Bay. So far the kids have collected over 300 tons of recycling which would have ended up in land fills or onto the beaches and into our seas. Just have a look at the Facebook page for inspiration :
Heaps of discarded fishing gut collected by Deon, which is extremely harmful to the areas marine life.